The Imitation of Patsy Burke

By John J. Gaynard

Below is the Kirkus review of THE IMITATION OF PATSY BURKE

"Booze, brawls, sex and schizophrenia—such is the artist’s life in Paris, according to this raucous satire.

When Patsy Burke, a world-famous Irish sculptor living in France, wakes up in his hotel with his body torn and bloody and no recollection of how it got that way, he’s not particularly surprised. A raging alcoholic given to beating up pimps in Paris dives, he’s used to blackouts and drunk tanks. Unfortunately, his latest bender has left a dead man in its wake, and Patsy’s attempt to piece together what he’s been doing for the last few days triggers a reckoning with his past and his demons. Said demons take the form of bickering voices inside his head, including Caravaggio, a Nietzchean figure who eggs on Patsy’s fistfights and womanizing; Goody Two-Shoes, a prim woman who castigates his atrocious treatment of friends and lovers; a wispy romantic named Forget Me Not; and a scary demiurge called the Chopper, whose insistent promptings to behead women with a meat cleaver are barely fended off by the remnants of Patsy’s sanity. These clashing personae narrate Patsy’s violent picaresque and roiling internal conflicts; he’s bombastic, selfish, preening and cynical, yet steeped in Irish-Catholic guilt. (His downward spiral was touched off when he learned that a statue he made of Jesus being sodomized by two monks—meant as a protest against clerical abuses—is now presiding over orgies conducted by Vatican pedophiles.) Patsy’s saga is plenty lurid—“You bit off his right ear and you spat it out”—yet the author’s pristine prose keeps it under control. Despite the tale’s almost Dantean excesses, Gaynard makes the tone ironic and droll—during an odyssey through the Parisian demimonde, Patsy finds himself discussing Marxist development economics with a glamorous prostitute—and registers delicate shadings of his antihero’s psychic travails. The result is an entertaining, over-the-top farce that still draws readers in with pathos.

A rich, darkly comic send-up of the art world and the megalomaniacal souls that populate it."

• Language: English
• Publisher: John J. Gaynard
• Release date: Aug 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465736710

John J. Gaynard

John J. Gaynard is from Mayo in the West of Ireland. He has lived and worked in Paris since the 20th century. Many of his friends, both dead and alive, have been sculptors of various nationalities. Some of their deeds and misdeeds have been captured in his second novel, 'The Imitation of Patsy Burke'. From the Kirkus Review: "Booze, brawls, sex and schizophrenia--such is the artist's life in Paris, according to this raucous satire. (Patsy Burke is) A raging alcoholic given to beating up pimps in Paris dives, he's used to blackouts and drunk tanks. Unfortunately, his latest bender has left a dead man in its wake, and Patsy's attempt to piece together what he's been doing for the last few days triggers a reckoning with his past and his demons. Said demons take the form of bickering voices inside his head, including Caravaggio, a Nietzchean figure who eggs on Patsy's fistfights and womanizing; Goody Two-Shoes, a prim woman who castigates his atrocious treatment of friends and lovers; a wispy romantic named Forget Me Not; and a scary demiurge called the Chopper, whose insistent promptings to behead women with a meat cleaver are barely fended off by the remnants of Patsy's sanity. These clashing personae narrate Patsy's violent picaresque and roiling internal conflicts; he's bombastic, selfish, preening and cynical, yet steeped in Irish-Catholic guilt. (His downward spiral was touched off when he learned that a statue he made of Jesus being sodomized by two monks--meant as a protest against clerical abuses--is now presiding over orgies conducted by Vatican pedophiles.)"

Book preview

The Imitation of Patsy Burke

A NOVEL

John J. Gaynard

Copyright © John J. Gaynard, 2011

All rights reserved

Smashwords Edition published August 2011

This is a work of fiction. All names, places and events it contains are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or organizations or events is entirely coincidental.

I dedicate this novel to the memory of Leslie Kaye, the Canadian sculptor.

THE OBSERVER

He senses a woman beside him in the bed, waiting for him to recover consciousness. He tries to place her. Carla, Laura, Louise, Marie-Claire, Maureen, Penny, Samira, Sandrine, the third wife…?

The Chopper says, ‘I know the name of this bitch. It’s the new one, Khadija. Khadija! And she’s going to prove as devious as all the rest of them!’

Khadija says haltingly, ‘A beautiful woman brought you back last night, Patsy. A taxi driver and Ahmed from downstairs helped her to carry you up. There was blood all over your face and clothes. The woman was surprised to see me in your room. She must have thought you were living alone in the hotel. She looked at me kindly, but she didn’t ask who I was. I asked her why you were in such a terrible state, and she told me she didn’t know exactly what had happened to you. She was just bringing you back here. She was afraid you had done something terrible to someone, and that something tragic had happened to you. That’s what she told me to tell you as soon as you woke up. I’m sure your arm is broken’

Terrible?

What had he done? He doesn’t want to know.

Khadija folds herself over him and the warmth of her body seeps through the sheet on his back. She takes his good hand in one of her own and runs her free fingers gently up and down his damaged cheek. She smells of fresh strawberries, and she brings to mind a picture of the green fields of Normandy, and their peaceful grazing brown and white cows at the end of June. And that brings up an image of the stone walls around the small fields of the West of Ireland, in the month of August, and the roadside ditches in which he lived and picked blackberries as a young child. Nostalgia cloys him.

Will he ever again see the forty shades of green?

Terrible?

Khadija says slowly, ‘The beautiful woman came back early this morning. She told me that the victim was most probably going to die. She asked me to tell you to make your peace with yourself, and to prepare for the worst.’

He doesn’t want to hear about this woman, or the situation she had told Khadija about. What victim? What did anybody else’s worsening situation have to do with Patsy Burke? Wasn’t his own situation bad enough without anybody making it worse for him?

‘You don’t need to tell me what you did if you don’t want to, Patsy.’

‘I must have done something to get my arm into this state. What did I do? Who did I damage this time?’

‘Khadija,’ he thinks, ‘when they make me remember what I did, I will be too ashamed to tell you.’

But he doesn’t offer her even a flicker of an eyelid to show her he can hear her voice.

‘The lady told me to tell you that she would try to gain as much time as possible, but she will eventually have to tell the police that you were involved. What are we going to do now, Patsy?’

We? Yes, Khadija has every right to class them under the word ‘we.’ Doesn’t he want to give her pleasure and protection, and hasn’t she recently been giving him her love?

But he can’t reply to her question about what they are going to do until the friends in his head make him remember what he has done.

What do the friends, like the Chopper, do while they wait for him to recover consciousness? Do they too sleep it off, or do they stay awake, and continue to fight among themselves?

Caravaggio says, ‘I, for one, remain vigilant whenever you are out for the count, Patsy. The other so-called friends tell you they had to come into existence to keep you from dying the sort of drunkard’s death in the gutters of Paris that would surely come from listening only to the guidance of Caravaggio. They all want to prove that they can be your only hope, that they can save you by remaking you entirely in their own image. But I, Caravaggio, will protect you and fight the fuckers off, today as I have done every other day since you invited me in.’

In the beginning, the friends, and their dialogues with him, were a gift for Patsy Burke. They encouraged him and shared useful viewpoints about his sculpture, and he went from success to success. They made suggestions from different perspectives as he sketched out new ideas, or as he chiseled and cut wood or stone. They coaxed him into previously unheard-of ways of shaping granite, or blue-gray Carrara marble, until he produced works of art his admirers describe as both natural and uncanny.

Now, the old artistic friends and their voices, with the one exception of Caravaggio, have been replaced by parts that don’t want to talk to him about art. They are competitors for the trophy of how he should live or, in at least one case, die.

To distinguish between their rival opinions, he has had to give nicknames to the strongest of the newcomers: the Scandal Man; Grownup Goody Two-Shoes; Forget Me Not; the Chopper; and Gustav, the Voice of Disillusion. Sometimes each one of them holds the floor alone. At other times, they talk over one another and cut into each other’s reminiscences and suggestions faster than a set of bragging New Yorkers.

Caravaggio says, ‘Patsy, there is no need to remember what happened yesterday. Even if it was a murder, you’ll weather it. Today, I want you to carve shadows out of marble, sculpt wood into eternal life, revel in the lies you will tell to whomever you meet, binge drink and perhaps fight over a streetwalker, or maybe beat up a couple of twats you’ll provoke into violence in one of the pimp bars of this city of Paris.’

The Scandal Man says, ‘Patsy, you have to make reparation for your ‘Jesus’ sculpture and the way it has contributed to the crime of pedophilia it was supposed to condemn.’

Other, smaller parts of Patsy, who all claim to be his friends, add to the mayhem in his mind as and when they feel like it. There are now so many friends, so many parts of him, that he sometimes loses track of which opinion he can attribute to which voice.

I can see that many of his friends, most notably the Scandal Man, are grooming him for their own ends, but I have no idea of what those ends may be.

I am also a part of Patsy Burke, but I no longer consider myself a friend. Until recently I would have said that I was Patsy Burke. But it came to the point where I couldn’t understand myself. In my younger days I was proud of the ‘good’ decisions I made that led me from one worldly success to another, but, the more successful I became, the more incapable I found myself of stopping the insane thoughts that provoked me into hasty actions that had a terrible impact on the people around me. Finally, I had to come to terms with the fact that Patsy’s mind and body were out of control, and there was nothing I could do about it.

The difference between the old me and the new me is simple. The old me thought I was the whole of Patsy Burke. The new me has accepted that it is only an insignificant part of the man, although it will ultimately be held responsible, perhaps even be found guilty, for his recent doings.

From being Patsy Burke, I have now moved to a point where I accept that I am only an observer. If I continue to observe him, from the inside, and record what happens, it is because I wish to be in a position to take over my former role, as the whole of Patsy Burke, and put up the best defense possible when the man is finally called to account.

Until a few weeks ago Patsy, in desperation, trying to do something about the onslaught of the voices, could still sit down on a wooden bench with a green wrought-iron back, in an empty alley in the Luxembourg Gardens in the cold morning sunshine, and close his eyes, and get deep into his thoughts, and round up the noisiest friends in the sawdust ring of what looked like an enormous circus tent erected in the middle of his mind.

He would chase one half of the friends out of the sawdust and down his right arm, so that the hand on that side could comfortably cradle them, and then send the other fifty percent down the left arm to nestle noisily in his left hand. He would painstakingly bring his hands together, and squash them into the sort of vocal, multicolored sculpture he hates, but which was the only one he could make of such a noisy bunch, an irregular burbling orb of sickly modeling clay that, as soon as he undid his clasp, melted into a greasy sludge of parts that flowed straight back up into his head.

His record for keeping his hands together in the Luxembourg Gardens was eighteen hours, from seven o’clock one Friday morning until one o’clock the following night.

It is now physically impossible for him to bring his hands together; to keep the voices of the parts quiet even for a few minutes.

The precise location of this hotel room returns to him: the top floor of a shabby, five-story, fifteen-room hotel that sits in the rue Marcadet, to the north side of Montmartre.

The faces of the other occupants of the hotel come back to Patsy Burke, the acquaintances he sometimes meets downstairs at the bar on the ground floor: defenseless young Afghan and Kurdish refugees; fatalistic old married Kabyles from Algeria who worked hard all their lives in France, who sent their money home every month, and now find themselves abandoned by an ungrateful wife and family, often sitting alone with vacant eyes over their glass of white wine in an out-of-the-way corner of the bar, but sometimes huddled with a variety of other loose-jowled Kabyles as they play long, drawn-out games of dominoes under the empty gaze of their fellow residents; bulb-nosed alcoholics; sidewalk-contemplating depressives; lice-ridden basket cases sporting thick layers of stinking and dirty brown bandages loosely held together with safety pins around their gangrenous ankles; the raddled old ginger-haired prostitute Marie-Annick, so over abused that she can no longer pull together a wizened smile as she proposes a toothless blow job to the men she brushes up to in the hotel’s narrow stairway, or whom she tries, unconvincingly, to pull into dark doorways in the rue de Budapest, at that time of the Parisian twilight where the light is so dim that you can’t distinguish between a dog and a wolf.

‘Remember now!’ says Caravaggio.

‘Don’t you dare use that word remember,’ says the voice of the Scandal Man, Sean O’Copious, who pretends he was a professor at Trinity College Dublin in the days before he started giving unwanted moral advice for free. The name flashes through Patsy’s mind in green and brown Celtic tweed lettering: Professor O’Copious.

‘Words telling Patsy Burke to remember anything at all, anything at all, you hear me, are in the domain I have carved out for myself since I managed to stop you driving him to rack and ruin. Let us keep the limits between us clear, Caravaggio,’ says the Scandal Man.

Caravaggio says, ‘This man needs a stiff antidote to all your fucking arguments that his work is responsible for any little worry you or the rest of the world may have.’

THE SCANDAL MAN

"Christianity is the only religion since the beginning of humanity that is not built on old bones. Jesus was crucified, sure enough, and then resurrected, but when he was finally spirited away he didn’t leave a bone behind him. There was no grave for him and therefore there should never have been a monument. But, in spite of that, the different strains of Christianity have spent more time building monuments to Christ, over the last two thousand years, than they have in listening to the man Jesus, whose teachings they purport to further. You are also guilty, Patsy.

Four years ago, you made a statue of Jesus, showing him on his knees, being sodomized by an Irish Christian Brother while another one holds the halo the Roman Catholic Church has conveniently placed around his head and pushes his penis into our young savior’s mouth.

You made the sculpture because you were angry about the crimes committed by priests against young people in Ireland. The intention was good, but even at the time you had doubts about whether showing that sort of act in black marble was wrong.

Putting your talent and reputation into such a work meant that the statue created a scandal all over the world. But nobody was more surprised by its unintended consequences than you. After an initial sale of the sculpture by Jean-Louis, your gallery owner, to a British collector, a mysterious group of Spanish buyers bought it at auction for the sum of fifteen million Euros, outbidding the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Rumor got back to you soon afterwards that it had been purchased by a group of high-ranking Catholic pedophiles who have stored it in a Vatican vault. They take it out two or three times a month and place it in the middle of their disgusting orgies with the young boys they pick up in the streets of Rome.

The situation needs to be set right, Patsy. The priests who have defiled the legacy of Jesus need to be driven out, and the only event that can expel them from their positions of abuse is a second coming."

CARAVAGGIO

"That is true enough; the Jesus man didn’t leave any bones behind him. But, as my disciple Nietzsche pointed out, before he went crazy, that man Jesus has always been pure poison for anyone who has a will to live. Personally, I’m thankful that the Catholic Church has never listened to Jesus, because that is what has allowed sculpture and painting to prosper.

Jesus Christ left a vacuum behind, by disappearing with his skeleton, and the priests persuaded the simple people, and artists such as us, to move into the vacuum and fill it with statues and paintings and relics and even splinters from the so-called true cross. Only a few years after his death, the whole Catholic Church in Rome started to put in place finger-bone worship and to bargain for the best price of whatever other relics or scraps of Saints it could find. So, in spite of the naive teachings of the Man of Nazareth, the old bones are still with us and there is not much difference between the sacrifices of young temple prostitutes to my pagan gods and the pedophiliac practices of the Catholic Church.

The only complaint I have about the ‘Jesus’ statue is that it has eclipsed everything else you have ever created."

THE OBSERVER

This morning is unlike other recent mornings. The parts that present themselves as friends will, of course, remind Patsy of the zones of his existence he wishes to forget: the unkindness to women parts; the moral weakness parts; the treason and betrayal parts; and they will buzz in and out of the honeycombs they have built in his head, and in which they lay their eggs and warm their larvae; the head that used to be a roomy cathedral of vivifying light and visions, humming faintly with the warm glimpses of works to be started, and pieces of sculpture begging to be finished, or with the faith-renewing excitement that came at the idea of a piece of work yet to be imagined.

He used to wake easily in this city, to listen to the chirruping of the sparrows, and daydream for half an hour, before he jumped from his bed and immediately picked up the heavy chisels he had dropped on the floor, out of tiredness, the night before.

So eager was he to get back to his workbench in those days, that there was no thought of food or drink until he had worked well into the evening, and that would be the time to stroll out into the bars, to eat until his belly rumbled with sauerkraut and beer, and he was merry enough to listen to jazz or reggae music in the New Morning club, in the street of small stables, and, with one lift of an eyebrow, pick up a fascinated woman from among the party-goers or from his artistic fellow-travelers, and to celebrate the joys of her flesh until the early morning.

‘How beautiful life is!’ was the greeting he used most often back in the days when his work went well, whenever he met up with other sculptors, painters, or writers. He remembers how many intelligent people in this sophisticated and cynical city of Paris laughed openly at him for saying something so dewy-eyed.

Then came the days, after the Vatican rumors about the ‘Jesus’ statue, when he could bear to spend no more than two minutes in bed after waking, so unpleasant was the crowding out of the early morning birdsong and the buildup of tension among the parts as soon as he regained consciousness. The only way to stop the talk from the parts was to unravel his body quickly from the sweat-drenched bed sheets, and begin to work them out of his mind, by tapping his coffee cup with his pencil until he could find the willpower to sharpen his chisels.

On the bad days, he was deserted by his vocation. For want of something positive to do, he obsessively swept the floors of his atelier near the Père Lachaise cemetery, emptied the dustpans of shavings, chips and dust into the large green plastic bags he put at the end of the narrow, cobbled alley where the work shop was located; and then wandered up and down the steep streets of Belleville, from café to café, taking a glass of white wine in each one, and staring at the sepia-toned photographs of old Paris on the walls, or mindlessly contemplating the activity in the illegal street markets, where gap-toothed and stick-thin immigrant Chinese people displayed, on threadbare gray or brown blankets on the sidewalk, the stuff they had reclaimed from household garbage cans all over the city the previous evening.

The way to avoid the conversations with the voices now, in the hours before sleep, is to drink a bottle of whiskey or brandy, but he can’t escape them in the morning.

What came first? Was it the overdrinking or was it the voices?

‘It was the megalomania,’ says Goody Two-Shoes. ‘You should have stayed humble. You’re a talented enough sculptor, but you’re not the genius your flatterers would have you believe, especially when they compare you to Brancusi. If you’d avoided getting an oversized head from listening to Caravaggio, you wouldn’t have needed to start drinking to drown me out."

Caravaggio says, ‘The mornings and nights of drinking aren’t the times of your life you need to forget, Patsy boy. Those are the nicest times, when the slightest new idea squats your mind like a Verdi chorus, and pumps you full of all-powerful, manic energy, when you have so much drive left at the end of the day that you have to fight it off physically in order to sleep. We need to get you back to the good days, the days of making sense out of chaos, of making shadows out of light, back to the days of heady creation.’

Patsy tries to remember how his original voice used to talk to him. Memories of it are vague. At other times, he wonders if he ever had one true voice. Has he always been just an imitator of Brancusi or Moore or Jean Arp, or the victim of any cuckoo that managed to lay an egg in his head?

Has he ever been original?

GUSTAV, THE VOICE OF DISILLUSION

"You don’t like me to remind you, Patrice, how you were kidnapped for ransom by a bunch of Pied-Noir crooks, after they heard how much your ‘Jesus’ statue had sold for. But that is the incident that changed everything. You probably wouldn’t be here in this hotel room if your life hadn’t been subjected to that, and if it hadn’t led to all the sordid disclosures about the private life you lived in parallel to your family and public lives.

Remember when they released you, when they threw you from a slow-moving Mercedes near the Porte de Passy, shortly before nine o’clock on a Friday morning, after all those months in a dark cellar? Your eyes hurt from the unexpected exposure to sunlight, and you didn’t have a centime on you to buy a metro ticket or to pay for a taxi. You walked to your apartment, through the tree-lined streets designed by Haussmann.

You rang the outer doorbell once, twice, three times. Inside the apartment, it took your wife a long time to answer. What was stopping her from pressing the button, in the apartment, next to the video screen that showed an image of anybody wishing to gain admittance? She finally reacted. The button was pressed, and you heard the buzzing sound and the click that opened the main door of the building.

You walked up the thick red carpet, on the great sweep of the marble stairway. The start of recognition she gave, although she had already seen you on the video screen, the way she clutched her white blouse over the deep décolleté of her tanned breasts, and the dismay in her eyes, all added up to a reaction you had not expected, even if you had anticipated there would be no warmth from her. Then the shock changed to cunning in her frightened eyes, and you picked up the distinct impression that, not only was your return not welcome, but that she had a male guest in one of the many rooms behind her.

Monsieur Dubos, the loyal lawyer to the art gallery you owned with Jean-Louis, protested that he was only in your home to look after your wife’s financial affairs.

Half an hour later, your five daughters stared at you icily from around the polished walnut dining room table, at which they had taken their places after being called home from their universities and private schools. You had wanted them back in the house before news of your release was printed in the newspapers or announced on the evening radio and television news programs, so that they wouldn’t be hounded by photographers and journalists at their school gates. You had expected them to throw their arms around you and weep a few tears of joy when they saw that you were once again a free man, but only the youngest one had tried to give you a kiss. Her mother had pulled her away from you angrily.

‘Why don’t you talk to me?’ you shouted angrily at the girls. ‘Do you know how much I dreamed over the past month of just being able to see you again, of holding you in my arms? I’m your father. I love you!’

They pinched their lips, under the stern gaze of your wife, and they looked away.

Your wife explained, ‘They couldn’t avoid reading the newspapers that came out while you were in captivity, Patsy, or seeing the television programs, or reading what was written about you on Facebook.’

She had built up a mountain of newspapers while you were being held hostage by the North African bastards who had chopped off your little finger. The pinkie had been sent to your wife by the ordinary postal service, not even with a first-class stamp, accompanied by a ransom letter. With the help of Jean Louis and Monsieur Dubos, she had paid the Pied-Noir gang five hundred thousand Euros, in used 100 Euro notes, to get you released before they moved on to the next step they had threatened, cutting off your entire arm.

Later, after reading the newspapers, after reading those damned copies of Libération, Le Monde, and Le Figaro, you were no longer surprised at the reaction of your children.

Many of the stories the journalists had written about you, especially the ones that exaggerated the sordid vignettes of your drunkenness, and provided the names of the over-the-hill sculptresses, prostitutes, and actresses with whom you had led a riotous Parisian nightlife, would certainly have been unwelcome news to them, unpleasantly surprising news that did not chime with the image you had always tried to cultivate, that of the talented, artistic, and faithful, if sometimes riotous and tipsy, father.

Yes, the newspapers had found a receptive target in the minds of your wife and children, and they had taken aim at it with their pages full of toxic, jealous, vindictive slurry. Your eldest daughter told you that she hadn’t wished to believe what her university friends whispered to her, at first, but believe it she had finally had to do, after reading the newspapers and seeing the rumors on the social media sites, herself. She