Artists Go to Hell

By Shane Eide

Artists who manage to get some exposure, at the very least, have to deal with the public. At the very worst, they end up in Hell.

Hell may come in the form of smarmy agents, sycophantic students, bad film scripts or journalists with ulterior motives.

There are lights at the end of the tunnel, albeit, peculiar ones: whether it is the solace that a struggling actor finds in impersonating the kind of cop he used to play on television or a philosophy based entirely on food which one ancient teacher adopts.

Some manna from heaven proves to be full of worms, however, as it is with one man admitted to a ‘hospital’ which turns out to be a strange prison run by subterranean authorities. As bookstores around the world close and the human race stops reading, God sits in Heaven with a representative of man as they negotiate on what to do about it.

Ultimately, the stories in this book form a whole which deals with what it means to be an artist in a blood-hungry world driven by its need for entertainment, pleasure and its neurotic tendency to destroy its own idols.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shane Eide
• Release date: Mar 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310434938

Shane Eide

Shane Eide is a part-time hermit, part-time flaneur, which means that he is either spending time on literary pursuits or taking walks and thinking about literary pursuits​. He lives in a little room walled with books and sleeps near a big desk, on which he doesn't write since all the quiet is too distracting. He usually goes someplace noisy in order to write as much about fiction as he writes fiction. He's been writing fiction since he was about 11, in which time he's written several novels that he never intends to publish and which no one will ever see, and several others that he wants to publish that he's read out loud to his gold fish. He's been writing what he supposes would be called non-fiction ever since he wrote "Shane was here," in easily erasable pencil on a desk in junior high. You can read his essays and occasional fiction at his blog, www.emergenthermit.com

Book preview

A Message to the Reader

This is as much a Rock n’ Roll record as it is a collection of fiction. Treat it as you treated those records you told your friends you were familiar with long before you’d heard them. Hide this record under your mattress, not because your parents will disapprove, but because you’re embarrassed by the bridge of their approval over the great gap of generational differentiation. Go on idolizing those artists in whom youth has violently expressed itself, even though these artists are now much older than your parents are. Continue to wonder why only dead artists get due respect just as dead artists will go on wondering for all eternity why they were only able to make a living off of their art after they died.

Where artists were once punished for corrupting youths and sending them to Hell, we now punish artists for not sending youths anywhere at all. Artists, in turn, use their art to punish people who don’t pay any attention to them. Accomplished artists incite people to punish others for them. That way, they can buy themselves time to make more art without caring so much what those people who didn’t pay attention to them didn’t think.

Nevertheless, no matter how much we try to avoid it, we punish our artists because they’re simply there, just as ancient man blamed the stars for his bad fortune because they were simply there.

Some artists manage to attain some sense of celebrity, but not all celebrities, as we know, manage to make anything like art. Just as stars show us the light of suns that are there no longer, artists show us the significance of gestures we no longer make. Artists make the gestures we no longer make shake hands with the gestures we make now.

It’s not true that artists disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Artists give comfort to those disturbed by their own comfort and disturb those comfortable being disturbed.

This isn’t all they do. Some of them manage to bore. But far be it from any artist to try and bore. That would be the most disturbing art of all. Boredom is never comforting. Funny enough, comfort is often boring.

S.E.

Archimbault-role

Having seen his author photos on the back of his books from the 80s, one might expect to see Jacques Archimbault in a crowd wearing a leather, studded jacket, his hair in large black spikes, a pack of Turkish cigarettes sticking dented out of his breast pocket and an expression that you might call pouty if he wasn’t also frightening—the punk bad-boy of French letters. However, surveying the patrons in the waiting area of the deli, I spotted a man whose face looked like an areal view of the Nevada deserts—someone now paying for having put in years of hard living. Nevertheless, he pulled off an old-man-chic in a denim jacket and a blue button-up shirt that covered the frailty of his heavy-smoker’s frame. His eyelids were hooded but he was warm and cheerful when he greeted me in careful, accented English.

‘I spent two semesters in England,’ he told me over coffee as we waited for our sandwiches. ‘I was kicked out of three boarding schools before I turned fifteen.’

‘Do you consider this an accomplishment?’

‘My father sure didn’t think so,’ he told me. His father was a lawyer, a heavy drinker and a merciless bully. ‘But I don’t really talk much about it.’

‘Too personal?’

‘Too boring. It’s so French, isn’t it? Every tortured artist from the country grew up that way.’

‘With lawyers for fathers?’

He shrugged.

‘Tortured’ is one unwanted title Archimbault has had to deal with. His novels feature blue collar workers with messianic complexes, dinner parties with misogynistic monologues, nihilistic Bahia services, erotic extraterrestrial encounters and talking animals that refuse to save the day.

‘It’s all in jest,’ he said. ‘My novels have nothing to say. They’re exaggerations of reality, not representations. I’m not writing anything like Animal Farm.’

‘In that sense you’re doing something closer to Jonathan Swift,’ I suggested.

‘I wouldn’t consider myself a satirist,’ he said. ‘If anything, I’m an exaggerationist.’

He was evasive about his influences. We got into a peculiar discussion about French literature in which he concluded that Roussel was ‘deliberately confusing,’ Stendhal was ‘out of touch,’ Balzac was ‘a man of the stupidest sort of intelligence,’ Proust was ‘boring as hell,’ Queneau was ‘Fatuous,’ Breton was ‘unpleasant as circumcision,’ and that Georges Perec was ‘a linguistic masturbator.’ He referred to one of his male contemporaries as a ‘stubborn teenage girl.’

One would suspect, having read his tone, that he was simply being difficult. It wouldn’t be surprising if, in a later interview, he praised these very same. He keeps the public continually on its toes.

When I asked him about the stream of creepy websites that have been popping up all over the internet featuring minute details about his habits and personal life, he confided that he is quite spooked about the whole thing.

‘It’s a kind of pornography, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The worst of it are those damned video clips.’

The said video clips were edited by obsessive fans (male fans seem to outnumber the female). My personal favorite is the clip, originally taken from a dramatic promotional video of his novel Le Chien Blanc, which features him as one of his own characters. The fan-clip takes a repeated image of Archimbault sliding his jacket off as he sits down, over and over, one shoulder bobbing followed by the other as his head slides from side to side, and eases himself out of the sleeves.

‘There are far less flattering videos of celebrities posted on the internet all the time,’ I said. ‘It could be much worse.’

‘As I fear it will be soon if things keep going the way they have,’ he said. ‘It’s worse than being naked … The repetition of so short a movement, the distinction of muscles and tendons and face-ticks … It’s humiliating, really. I never would have imagined being fetishized, or that it would be quite so alarming.’

One clip loops brief footage of Archimbault with a look of gross derision on his face as he makes a jerk-off gesture into the air with his holed-hand. ‘That,’ he told me, ‘was in response to something a journalist asked me about Mitt Romney.’ I laughed but he looked away and shook his head. ‘This brief, schoolyard scatology is now echoing forever … forever and ever for all eternity out in cyber space.’

We continued the interview at his apartment; a large, bare space decorated in monkey bones. There were molds of fossils framed on the wall. There were cubby-holes in the hall full of skulls. ‘I like monkeys,’ he said. ‘It’s an obligation, I feel. We’re up here, driving cars, wearing nice suits, being civil. They’re still out there picking fruit and eating fleas off of one another. We left them behind, didn’t we?’

‘Do you think monkeys are more humane than us?’ I asked. ‘I mean, for taking care of one another’s fleas?’

‘Well, they may be more humane in that sense, but it’s not like humans go around ripping each other’s scrotums off,’ he said.

‘We just go to war instead,’ I said.

He nodded sadly.

He showed me his office with a large window facing the street.

‘Does the city street inspire you?’

‘No. The skyline does,’ he said.

He took me to his room and said, ‘Nothing happens here, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, I’m in between marriages,’ he said. I wanted to ask him what this meant but hesitated. He continued: ‘I’m sad to say, I’m popular at the brothels.’

‘Do you worry about infections?’

‘Oh, the worry is always there. That reminds me, I’m due for a checkup.’

His smile is always there to tell me that his remarks require no follow-up. It’s all part of his whacky, surreal sense of humor … which we suffer with the utmost patience since we love him, even though he thinks he’s so damned clever for it. I could have almost guessed his next move and his next word better than he could. As if I didn’t travel all the way down here to see him. Like I haven’t read all his work and all his interviews. Like I haven’t been anticipating this. Surely, he thinks he can hide himself from someone like me. He’s wrong

He opened one of his top drawers and produced a small, black object that looked like some kind of picking tool. ‘This here,’ he said, ‘is one of the oldest crafted hand tools in the world. Prehistoric man made it before there was any such thing as an economy. God knows if there was even such thing as a barter system yet.’ He laughed. ‘They were working for their need. Imagine that kind of world.’

We left the room.

He left his drawer open long enough for me to pass it again. ‘And you just keep it there with your underwear?’ I asked as he turned his head to look thoughtfully toward the window. I dipped my hand into his dresser drawer.

He shrugged. ‘Well, where else would I keep it?’ he said. ‘It’s the most important place. Don’t you Americans keep your guns there?’

We got onto the subject of politics for a while but he requested at the last minute that I not include it in the interview, which I wanted to honor because it was all very boring anyway.

We shared a few glasses of port before I left and he insisted that I stay for more and more drinks. When I left, he showed great concern, wanting to call me a cab, but I ensured him that I was staying at a hotel just down the block. He asked me to come by and see him again before I left. This was convenient since I didn’t and don’t have any intention of leaving.

I’ve been at a hotel for the past seven months, just waiting for the moment I would meet him. Now that I have a monopoly on his private world, I’m not about to let it all go.

I saw my ridiculous face in the reflection of a shop window. There was a droplet of dried wine on my cheek and purple patches all over my lips. I reached for my handkerchief, wiped my mouth, but realized far too late that it was not my handkerchief but the pair of briefs I’d snatched from Archimbault’s drawer. I pulled them away from my face, the elastic band collapsing like a yawning mouth, and stuffed it back in my pocket as a blond girl looked at me in horror. I went on walking as though nothing had happened.

It was nice to see Archimbault’s place again. I’d only ever visited it alone, in the darkness, making dexterous moves to sneak in and out of the window on those occasions that he left it open when he went on walks or went whoring or whatever else he did. But it was so good to be inside with him. When I was there alone, it was only haunted by his ghost. I could never go back to his place in secret as I’d become accustomed to doing. I am now forced to return as his friend. If I were to go again in secret, there would be traces of me all over his neat home, just as there are now, thanks to myself and those many others who love him, traces of him all over the internet—his most sensuous movements repeated forever and ever, all his involuntary little ticks resting now alongside photographs of his freshly-nicked briefs.

The Fourth Pair

PART I

—

Silas’s agent, Murphy, was always at their agreed meeting place early with a half empty cocktail in front of him. Silas suspected that, once again, this meeting was designed to graduate him from the place he held in the memory of Americans as ‘that black guy from Cooper’s Law.’

This time it was a Japanese café. Wherever they went, Murphy was always familiar enough with the staff that a mere beckon of his finger was all he needed to have them stumbling all over each other to meet his demands so they could earn a film-industry-sized tip. Murphy was the kind of cat who would comment on your clothes without complimenting them. This time he said nothing about Silas’s clothes, but rather, finger-beckoned the waitress, squinted down at the menu and said, ‘Sushi sounds good.’ He looked up at Silas. ‘Doesn’t sushi sound good?’

Silas answered in the affirmative as though admitting something shameful and ordered the California Roll. Murphy attempted an impoverished Japanese pronunciation to order a dish that only white people trying to distance themselves from the ordering habits of other white people would order.

When the waitress left, Murphy muttered, ‘You always get the California Roll.’

‘Everything else tastes like raw fish,’ Silas said.

‘What’d you think of the script?’

‘I think it’s damned stupid.’

‘Of course it’s stupid,’ Murphy said, calmly. ‘It’s a comedy.’

‘But it’s not a funny comedy.’

‘Well, it’ll be funnier in execution.’

‘It’s about the Provisional IRA. How is that funny or even remotely tasteful?’

‘Silas—’

‘There’s no part for me in it. There’re no brothers in the IRA.’

‘Why not? Life isn’t a series of easily compartmentalized stereotypes, Silas. Why can’t an African American be part of the IRA?’

‘So this highly farcical film is also a piece of realism? Is that what this is?’

Murphy glanced away from him as though finally seeing the trouble with the idea and shrugged.

‘What is Hollis Reeves trying to accomplish with this shit, anyway?’ Silas asked.

Murphy pushed scripts on Silas by pretending that he had a perpetual secret. He looked around to see if anyone was listening before he said, ‘Listen, you don’t need me to tell you this movie’s gonna be a big deal. I want you to think about this script before you dismiss it too quickly. And this isn’t slapstick, as you said. Think irony. Think satire. But just think.’

‘I’ll pretend to,’ Silas muttered.

‘That’s why I love ya, baby,’ Murphy said, a finger-gun.

‘Just out of curiosity,’ Silas said, slowly shredding a napkin on the table with the teeth of his fork, ‘do you know who ended up getting that part in the Tulsa script?’

Murphy tossed his hand. ‘That kid—you know, that singer. Brad Polliver.’

Silas frowned. ‘The one with the prank show?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘But … he’s white.’

‘He is, in fact,’ Murphy said.

The waitress brought their food and Silas waited for her to leave before he said, ‘Why’d they give the part to a white kid?’

Murphy shrugged.

‘I thought the casting calls specifically asked for black guys.’

‘I guess they found a way around it?’ Murphy said, more as a passable suggestion.

Silas used his chopsticks to roll his sushi around his plate. ‘I don’t get it, man.’

‘You know how these things are, Silas,’ Murphy said. ‘You don’t want to accept a role like that anyway. Not in this vulnerable stage in your career.

Silas stuffed a piece of sushi into his mouth.

‘What are you doing wanting cop roles anyway?’ Murphy said. ‘Isn’t that just the thing you should try to get away from? You’re already "that guy from Cooper’s Law.’ Murphy had obviously made a conscious effort to emit the word ‘black’ from the common description. ‘Nor do you want to end up that cop from Cooper’s Law that always plays a cop."’

‘If the script’s good I’ll do it,’ Silas said.

‘But the script wasn’t good.’

‘Like the one you gave me is any better?’

Murphy looked thoughtfully into his eyes, glanced down at his plate and played around with a piece of sushi with his fork. He smiled and shook his head. ‘The California Roll. For godsakes.’

‘At least I’m eating mine with chopsticks, dickhead.’

—

Cop roles interested Silas because he had an infrequent habit of arresting people in real life. In two weeks, he’d managed to make three citizen’s arrests. Those three arrests were responsible for his parting with three out of the four pairs of handcuffs he’d been given after his time on Cooper’s Law.

For his first arrest, he was at a stoplight when a woman shouted that she’d been robbed. He saw the man running down the street with her purse so he pulled his then pickup onto the sidewalk and flipped the guy over its hood just like they did on Cooper’s Law a dozen times in five seasons. By the time he started giving the guy Miranda, he heard sirens so he jumped back in his truck and left. He never heard a word about it again from anyone.

His second arrest was at a club. This time he had a fake badge with him. In the bathroom, he saw a six-foot tall Caucasian male of about eighteen give a five and a half foot tall Hispanic male of about twenty a small bag of pills in exchange for cash. He walked over to the kid, showed him his badge, pulled him outside by the arm, cuffed him and left him there since he couldn’t do much else and didn’t want the police to take credit for his arrest.

The third ‘arrest’ caused him a considerable amount of shame. It was a doughy, teenage girl walking down the street late at night whose shorts were like a napkin and whose top was like a series of small flags tied together. He arrested her for soliciting prostitution. A man finally pulled up and informed Silas that the girl was his daughter and not a prostitute but, merely, an inappropriate dresser. The girl spit in Silas’s face and this particular spit-gob was not passive and salival but committal and membranous—the kind of spit cultivated, not only by years of smoking, but perpetual sinus trouble.

—

Silas came home to find Paula at his place eating what was, for her, an atypical fast-food salad.

‘Are you gonna take the part?’ Paula asked and licked the dressing off her plastic fork.

‘I’m not taking the part. It’s stupid,’ Silas said and fell onto the beanbag chair under his mini palm tree.

‘Maybe you should reconsider,’ Paula said, setting her plastic salad box on top of the pile of over-stuffed garbage.

‘You and everyone else.’

‘You know it’ll probably get Oscars. Maybe not the big ones but it’ll probably get staging or costuming or sound or whatever.’

‘The script just sucks,’ Silas said. ‘The jokes are terrible.’

‘Maybe they’re just not your kind of jokes.’

‘That’s a good enough reason to forget the whole thing,’ Silas said, shifting around to get comfortable. ‘I’m not gonna be part of a movie I don’t like.’

‘Is that the only kind of work you do?’ Paula asked. ‘Work you like?’

Silas, who’d been glancing noncommittally at his phone, looked over to find her returning his glance, her brow raised. The question surprised him. It contained some unspoken conviction that he both hated and feared—something masochistic disguised as utilitarian morality. ‘Is there any other kind of work I should do?’

‘Maybe work that’ll help your career.’

‘You don’t have faith in my career?’ Silas teased.

‘Of course I do.’ Paula came into the living room and sat on the far side of the couch. ‘I just think you have a lot of potential and I think you could use that potential to get better roles. And with better roles, you could get a better place.’

‘What’s wrong with my place?’ Silas said, the high-tenored playfulness of his tone hiding genuine hurt.

‘I’m sorry, that sounded awful, didn’t it?’ Paula said. ‘Do what you want. You’ll be great. You don’t need Hollis Reeves.’

‘But I guess I could be looking around a bit harder,’ Silas added, ‘instead of making a cameo now and then on some dumb ass how.’

Paula laughed at his frankness.

‘You know what I’d like to do?’ Silas said.

‘What’s that?’ Paula walked over to him and fell onto the beanbag chair beside him. She shifted around and he almost fell on top of her for the way the unruly piece of furniture sank.

‘I’d like to try something completely different,’ Silas said.

‘Sketch comedy?’

‘Nothing acting oriented at all.’

‘You wanna be a high-school teacher?’

‘God no … What if I joined the police force?’

Paula laughed without hesitation.

‘What’s so funny bout that?’ Silas said, smiling.

‘You do not want to be a cop, Silas.’

‘I do. What if I tried?’

‘It’s not something you just try, like pottery.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’d never be able to live it down. You couldn’t go back to acting because no one would take you seriously.’

‘Who says I’d wanna go back to acting?’

Paula grabbed him by the wrist and manually pulled his arm around behind her head. ‘You being a cop would be like Shaq rapping.’

‘Shaq’s record wasn’t bad,’ Silas said.

‘Where’s all this coming from, anyway?’

‘The thought just occurred to me. It occurred to me to act one day but I just happened to do that first, you know?’

Paula smiled at him and studied his face, from chin to brow.

‘What do you think of that?’ he added.

‘I think success just isn’t enough for you, Silas.’

—

Paula met Silas while playing a nurse for a few episodes on Cooper’s Law. She stitched up a fake wound for him in their first scene together. The fake wound looked real, thanks to the bloody makeup, and they kept having to do more takes because she laughed whenever Silas fake-cringed. He liked it when she touched his knee. That’s how it started. She touched his knee a lot after that.

Paula had the body of a small boy and a butt like a sheet of paper. She wore sweatshirts longer into the end of winter and beginning of spring than anyone else, as though her body never had enough on it to keep her warm. Silas, who was going soft in the middle and insecure about it, was just as much of a pillow or piece of furniture to her as he was a lover. His belly, sides, legs, arms and cheeks were better than the springy comfort of a duvet, the tenderness of a bed or the sinking mischief of a beanbag chair. His love handles were not so much handles as they were love stations—love checkpoints, love grooves. He said he wanted to cut wheat out of his diet but she kept on feeding him wheat because she was afraid that if the wheat disappeared, the comfort of his love grooves would disappear.

Silas and Paula happened to find a rerun of Cooper’s Law on cable television and watched it for giggles. Silas’s giggles stopped at the instant his character had his shirt off and he saw how fit he used to be.

—

Half asleep, never quite knocked out by Nyquil, Silas would slip into half-dreams in which malevolent spirits lurked on all sides of his apartment building. Demons hid in the courtyards watching the young maidens bathe in the fountains. A French-scene would replace the anachronisms of the fountain world and its faun-like devils would give way to the pavement world, the gravel world, the world of pipe factories, junkyards, twitching meth-heads and sauntering pimps. They weren’t so bad. The ones he worried about were the ones just like him—those who got a distinct thrill out of little things and organized their whole lives around perpetuating a higher frequency of those little things, and thus, their accompanying thrills. But whereas he used those little thrills as a fantasy cop, he knew there were a great many out there who attached themselves to obsessive, repetitive images and sensations, using the world up for the satiation of one more violence-fix.

In Silas’s half-sleep, the criminals and the heroes were so close that