Art Official

By Kurt Cole Eidsvig

"The General had the art world around the neck and was leading it from Billy Keening to Fletcher Flynn and Ray Lowenstein. I provided the prisoners. Everyone was fitted for their nooses."

Arthur Oswald Fischel is the most important figure in American art you've never heard of. He's the man who discovered almost every consequential artist i

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terror House Press, LLC
• Release date: Jan 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781951897826

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Also by Kurt Cole Eidsvig

POP X POETRY

Copyright © 2023 Terror House Press, LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-951897-82-6

EDITOR

Matt Forney (mattforney.com)

LAYOUT AND COVER DESIGN

Matt Lawrence (mattlawrence.net)

TERROR HOUSE PRESS, LLC

terrorhousepress.com

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Artist’s Statement #1 — I Am the Dream

Chapter 2: The General

Chapter 3: The Color of Jade

Chapter 4: The Pre-Sherbet Dreams of Billy Keening

Chapter 5: Eva and the Million-Dollar Legs

Chapter 6: Artist’s Statement #2 — Art Official: Memories of My Life in Art

Chapter 7: Primary Witness for the Defense

Chapter 8: 25¢ in This Economy

Chapter 9: Religious Painting

Chapter 10: Church and State

Chapter 11: Easter is the Cruelest Month

Chapter 12: Artist’s Statement #3 — The Face of God

Chapter 13: Crossed-Out

Chapter 14: Confessional

Chapter 15: Precious Metals

Chapter 16: Cathedral

Chapter 17: The First Postcard

Chapter 18: Commercials/Success

Chapter 19: Artist’s Statement #4 — The New Portraiture

Chapter 20: Drawings and Timelines

Chapter 21: Postcard Number 2

Chapter 22: Swingers

Chapter 23: Gifts from Strangers

Chapter 24: The Relief You Can Count On

Chapter 25: Letters and Numbers

Chapter 26: Audience

Chapter 27: Light Reading

Chapter 28: Trinities

Chapter 29: Artist’s Statement #5 — Contemporary History

Chapter 30: Catalogues and Inventories

Chapter 31: A History of Red

Chapter 32: Windowless (Facility D)

Chapter 33: Third Chances

Chapter 34: How Rothko Always Started Things

Chapter 35: Changes in the Old Mahogany

Chapter 36: Artist’s Statement #6 — Reassembly Required

Chapter 37: A Return to Black and White

Chapter 38: My Favorite Cocktail

Chapter 39: The Card Players

Chapter 40: The Case of the Broken Color Wheel

Chapter 41: Uncle Sam and His Story of Art

Chapter 42: Directionally Hopeless

Chapter 43: Untangling the Scribbles

Chapter 44: Before You Are Here Was Here

Chapter 45: Blacked-Out Addresses

Chapter 46: Artist’s Statement #7 — New Landscapes

Chapter 47: The Places I Could Be

Chapter 48: Going Gauguin

Chapter 49: Artist’s Statement #8 — The Invisible Man

Chapter 50: Anatomically-Correct Personal Anthropology

Chapter 51: Crosses to Bear

Chapter 52: Caught in a Series of Squares

Chapter 53: Artist’s Statement #9 — Channel Surfing on a Frozen Lake (Still-Lifes)

Chapter 54: Red-Shift—Blue-Shift

Chapter 55: All of Us Shot Andy Warhol

Chapter 56: All of Us Will Hang

Chapter 57: A Mirror, Reflecting Into Infinity

Chapter 58: Artist’s Statement #10 — Caricatures

Chapter 59: The Day Painting Died

Chapter 60: Memorial Days

Chapter 61: Stains We Leave Behind

Chapter 62: Ghost Town

Chapter 63: Artist’s Statement #11 — Unauthorized Biography

Chapter 64: The Art of Camouflage

Chapter 65: Do Not Enter

Chapter 66: Artist’s Statement #12 — Souvenirs

Chapter 67: Artist’s Statement #13 — Lady Liberty

Chapter 68: The Pictures and the Words

Chapter 69: Vanishing Point

Art is life. And life is make-believe. — Harold Heinrich

Chapter 1: Artist’s Statement #1 — I Am the Dream

Everyone has heard the story about Fletcher Flynn and his first exhibition at Foundations Gallery. Only 27 years old when the show infamously sold out, three of the upstart’s paintings were purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the first night of the show. The centerpiece of the affair, Silver Eagle, was a super-flat representation of an American bald eagle akin to one found on the back of any American 25¢ piece at the time. But Fletcher Flynn’s Silver Eagle was an acrylic painting eight feet tall by six feet wide. When asked whatever had moved him to paint this iconic American image while art remained stuck in a jumble of collage and photography, Fletcher Flynn replied:

"I had a dream one night I was painting the back of a quarter, a silver bald eagle.

The next day I went to the store, bought the materials, and started to paint.

—from Fletcher Flynn: Icons, by Sal Pasqual. Foundations Gallery Press, 2002

No one could tell whether he was being ironic or iconic, and it didn’t much matter. His first show sold out, with the artwork flying off the walls like they were eagles themselves. Fletcher Flynn was a hit. While there was no evidence of his work beforehand, this fact only added to the mystery. He claimed to have destroyed everything from his early career. Seemingly overnight, the young man went from complete obscurity to art world superstardom.

He was still painting up until very recently. There was a waiting list just to be considered to buy one of his paintings. Prices started at $600,000, sight-unseen. Crazy to think that when I first met Fletcher, he was living in a dingy commercial space and cooking on a hot plate. For money, he designed department store window displays with his upstairs neighbor, Dr. Marvell. Art world legend states that the famed gallery owner and super-aggressive art dealer Salvatore Pasqual discovered Fletcher on a visit to Doc M’s abode. Sal had allegedly asked, Who else do you know who has it in this space?

Back then, we spent most of our time thinking about the italicized indefinable it. What was it? Who could find it? Could we be it? Would we find it? Could we get to it before too late?

It was everything.

A few months after that sellout show, Fletcher Flynn had a pocketful of money, and the Met had three new paintings from the hottest young artist in the world.

While any aspirations I may have had as a painter were long dead by the time Fletcher Flynn debuted, I still consider his career one of my most important masterpieces. With Fletcher Flynn and nearly every artist you have ever heard of since the World Trade Center Towers turned to dust, I was the creator. I was the conceptual artist. God made man from nothing. I made art from less than that the day I knocked on Fletcher Flynn’s studio door. Don’t believe everything you read about Sal Pasqual.

Don’t believe everything you read about anything.

True, one of the reasons I selected Flynn and encouraged him to dispose of every shred of art he had ever made was because he was engaged in a pronounced and powerful sexual relationship with Dr. M. I was already trying—and failing—to sabotage my secret mission. This doesn’t change the fact that Fletcher and many like him were my little army of artistic Frankensteins. I’d like to call them Frankenstein’s Monsters, even if I am the one who was chased by torches into Guantanamo Bay. I take all the blame, and Fletcher Flynn gets all the credit. But without my guidance, I hardly think the hundreds of prints and variations on Bald Eagle 1 and the rest of Fletcher’s oeuvre would have ever seen the inside of a museum.

As a side note: the New Orleans Art Spot just acquired over 750 of Fletcher Flynn’s drawings. Not a single one dates before 2002. If nothing else, Fletcher Flynn was a good listener. He destroyed all his previous work, just like I told him to.

One other note: my boss at the time was utterly unruffled when he discovered Fletcher Flynn was gay, to my complete chagrin. The General, as I often called my clandestine employer behind his back, said to me the day after Fletcher’s sell-out opening, That boy may have painted the back of a nickel, but he’s as queer as a three-dollar bill.

But I’m ahead of myself. How, you ask, can I take credit for Fletcher Flynn, arguably one of America’s finest treasures? One of our most celebrated artists? The man I have heard more than once referred to as the da Vinci of our time?

Simple. I’m the one who found Fletcher Flynn. Forget everything you’ve heard about Sal Pasqual, Foundations Gallery, and Dr. M. Forget the art world legends of fame and fortune in a single night at the hands of smiling fate. In fact, forget everything you think you know about art. And life. And everything.

I’m the one who walked into Fletcher Flynn’s studio apartment in 2002 and explained that if he wanted to be a rich and famous artist, he had to do two things. The first was to destroy every single piece of art he’d ever made. The second was to listen to me very carefully. It didn’t hurt any when I peeled a stack of forty-one-hundred dollar bills off a roll and told him to buy some new supplies. You’re gonna need them, I remember saying at the time. By then, most of my transactions were loose imitations of my own discussions with The General.

And one more thing, I said on that afternoon in 2002. There was light pouring into his filthy apartment. Fletcher raised his large 27-year-old eyes to me and listened. God, that kid could listen.

Your first painting is this, I said and handed him a quarter, tails-up.

A quarter? he said.

A silver bald eagle, just like this, I said. I felt my face twitch as I tried to keep a straight face.

I can see Fletcher Flynn now as a painting. His expression is a portrait in my memory, hanging among the colorful landscapes scattered across the walls of that makeshift studio. Fletcher was aghast, his face a contemporary version of Edvard Munch’s Scream. The room, a curator’s nightmare, was covered with dozens of awful Impressionist rip-offs.

And make it huge, I said.

Of course, the rest is history. When I look back, I see his face, the lines of shock smoothed out and blurred by the stack of $100 bills in his outstretched hand. In another climate, I may have encouraged Fletcher Flynn to paint himself—a prophetic self-portrait of the older man he would never become.

This is why I take credit for Fletcher Flynn and his explosive career. I was the one who told him to paint a vast, flat, silver bald eagle with acrylic paint on canvas. Who am I? I’m Arthur Oswald Fischel, the unknown tastemaker of post-9/11 American art, the most important conceptual artist of all time—and a man who made artists, not just art—and the inventor of the NFT.

I am the dream.

Chapter 2: The General

I hate Americans.

This was the first thing The General ever said to me. He delivered the line as he walked into the back office of my already failing gallery on 79th Street in New York. As he walked through the space, before he even made it to my office, he certainly saw all the green stickers next to art that hadn’t sold. Two shows—the first two shows I’d put on—and not a single sale. We were closed for the afternoon to take one artist’s work down and put up the next, so I wasn’t sure how this source of onion breath and rumpled tan trench coat had appeared in my gallery, much less the cramped quarters of my back office space. I looked up from my computer screen.

Excuse me? I said.

That’s what the rest of the world is saying about us. ‘I hate Americans,’ he said.

He didn’t ask but plunked right down in the seat across my desk. Originally planned as a private viewing area for high-end patrons, the back room had quickly become unnecessary storage space for me and my computer. I assumed Jade had let this guy in the door, though I wasn’t exactly sure why.

I’m Sergeant-Major Nelson, and you’re going to help me, he said.

I knew right away the fellow was odd. In fact, he looked vaguely homeless. This Sergeant-Major was something akin to a joyous, energetic derelict with his growth of stubble and eager eyes.

Class, flip your books to Chuck Close’s enormous photorealistic painting titled Mark from 1978-9.

Here, he said. That spitting image of a Chuck Close masterpiece offered a badge across the desk. In the see-through window of the pleather case was a high and tight image of The General in a photo ID. Beneath his name, the identification gave his title as Cultural Ambassador and held the appropriate leaves and insignias. An eagle with arrows in its talons and some stars swirled around the photograph.

Appropriate. Who was I to know what was appropriate? I do remember thinking it was hard to believe the source of halitosis and noise in my office ever had a haircut and tie like those in the picture. Years had not been kind to this government workhorse. Sitting there across my messy desk, below his jacket, The General still wore a suit. He just didn’t look like he owned one.

Are you looking for some art? I asked. My voice cracked, hopefully. In the two shows, after the remortgages and all the borrowing, then the selling of my old downtown loft, I was in deep trouble. I’d needed to at least sell a single painting from the first shows I’d held. Nothing doing. My stomach constantly tried to digest itself. I trembled around the clock. If this Sergeant-Major didn’t want to buy a painting, I had one more show, tops, before the bank took everything back. Failed experiment number one hundred would be in the books for Arthur Oswald Fischel and my ridiculous career.

Now we’re getting to it, The General said.

I opened my eyes a little wider and nodded. I’d long suspected art salesmanship was something like counseling or psychotherapy. You listened a lot, and at the end of the session, the person wrote a check. Of course, I was on the verge of learning a thousand more reasons why people wrote those checks. Or twenty-six thousand.

A born salesman, he said. First off, soldier, I don’t want to buy some art. I want you to sell some art.

We have that in common.

I decided to give this military guy some down-home aw-shucks America and apple pie bullshit to see how it would play.

We’ve been watching you, he vaguely waved out toward the gallery. This wacko motioned toward the door, toward New York and the Upper East Side, toward the Duane Reade and Chase Bank I shared the city block with. We’ve been watching you, he said.

Just then, my girlfriend and gallery assistant, Jade, walked by. She craned her neck, I caught her eyes, and I rolled both of mine up toward the ceiling in the standard sign language for, Why in the world did you let this lunatic in my office? The General flicked his wrist, slammed the door shut, and looked back at me.

CalArts, NYU, Art History, art practice. In fact, you didn’t do so bad yourself in the art game before giving it up to open this place.

With the door closed, his breath was even worse. Or maybe the intensifying claustrophobic sinking feeling I had was the fact that he knew so many things about me.

But you chose, he continued, to open a gallery two months before some jumbo jets flattened out the world.

I remember thinking at the time that this man was insane. No one I knew was talking about the World Trade Center tragedy like that. Flattened the world.

Soldier, he said. I’m your meal ticket.

I think the second soldier had me calling him The General in my mind. Or maybe Jade said it later that day after he left, when we both stood there in the gallery, celebrating what was to be the beginning of our end. Then again, we were over the moment we met.

The General then did something he would do twelve more times in the span I knew him, thirteen if you count the Statue of Liberty incident. The General pulled a package out of his jacket about the size of a brick, all wrapped up in a crumpled paper bag, and set it on the desk.

Today’s Art Lesson: In art school, we used paper bags, or the intricate folds in clothing, for advanced still-life drawing assignments. The exercise is a tell-all as to whether or not you can render light and dark, shadow and texture. What’s more difficult to draw than a paper bag? Can you make cloth and paper different in their wrinkles, in their depth?

In real life, the color and consistency of The General’s jacket and the paper bag brick he laid on my desk were just about the same. That would never do in art, though. You’d have a drawing where a man and a book look the exact same as they sit across your desk, threatening to change your life.

This is your seed money to put on a successful art show. Go ahead, he said.

I lifted the bag. I hefted the weight. Who knew a bag of money would actually be heavy?

You pick the artist and introduce him to the man. Use the money to help whoever you choose. Coach him a little and then disappear. We handle the rest.

You want me to host a show?

No, soldier, that’s too close for right now. We need you to find an unknown New York artist with some talent. This is a tip-top secret mission. The rest of the world out there is flying planes into skyscrapers, and now we have fire in the Middle East, and people hate us even more for retaliating. Good old George Junior and the powers that be need you and me to fight the war on terror starting right here on 79th Street.

The General had passion. When I taught at the CUNY campus on the Upper East Side, I used to teach techniques and then pray each of the students had passion. Well, maybe not pray, as I certainly had no spiritual leanings back then. But this guy was an artist, all right.

Forget ‘why me,’ he said. Think ‘why not me.’ We like your writing, like your space. Hell, we even like your politics for this thing. You know New York art, and we need some people no one has ever heard of—no one suspects—to make into stars. You pick some good unknown artists who need a break. We take care of the rest.

Even though he spoke so passionately, the onion-breathed General, I really had no idea the extent of what he was asking. I opened the bag and peeked inside. It was a brick of $100 bills.

"I’m a simple man and give simple directions. Go find an artist. Coach him in his portfolio and presentation and bring him to Sal Pasqual. Then you disappear and pay your rent.

What we have here is something between you and me. You don’t tell her. He jerked his head toward the gallery. You don’t tell the artist. You don’t say anything to nobody. Not even Sal. He’ll understand.

I don’t say anything to anybody,

Nothing, he said.

One of my fellow inmates here in Guantanamo Bay says I must have always had larceny in my heart. I offer, for example, my next question to The General. I said, How do you know I won’t take the money and run?

He laughed and stood up. If you were stupid, we wouldn’t be talking. Nice job on the SAT, by the way.

Sal Pasqual?

You even have a real firecracker for a memory, he said. Give the artist some dough, help him with canvases. All that crap. We want it to look like Pasqual would be crazy not to give the guy a breakout show. Even though no one’s ever heard of him.

The General didn’t need to tell me who Sal Pasqual was. Or how to find his 8th Street gallery. Unlike the artists I was asked to go recruit, everyone had heard of Sal. He was the hit-maker in New York. And had been for a generation.

As The General turned the door handle, I asked, Anything else?

You have six weeks. Those towelheads are convincing the whole world that we’re the blue-eyed Satan.

How’s this going to help?

God Bless America, he said and walked out the door.

Chapter 3: The Color of Jade

The first thing I did was tell Jade.

No, that’s not true. The first thing I did was count the money. I was sure it must be counterfeit, or maybe that I was on some sort of MTV-type reality show. The Surreal World. I went to the doorway of my tiny office in my tiny failing gallery on 79th Street and peered out into the cavernous rooms. How could something so small feel so empty? No one was there except for Jade. The General was gone.

As I closed the door, I heard Jade’s muffled voice ask, Is everything okay? I twisted and locked the bolt.

In opening the first bag, I was far beyond my skills and training. In all my personal cursing, all my internal yelling that I should have somehow foretold the future and not opened a new gallery in New York City two months before September 11, I could have never predicted this future: a paper bag filled up with a brick of cash resting on my messy desk, the contour and wrinkles reminding me of The General’s dingy trench coat.

In all the crazy that emerged in my life after I opened the bag, perhaps the silliest permutations were the calculations I did while counting the money that first time. I looked for sequential serial numbers. I held a few hundreds up to the light and felt at the paper to test its consistency. I tried to smudge the ink. I even bit down on a bill the way colorful prospectors did with lumps of rock in old movies to discern whether they had glittering wealth or fool’s gold. The insanity in all this, besides the biting, was I knew nothing about counterfeiting or even why the bad guys in movies asked for non-sequential bills. But every artist I ever handed a wad of money to did nearly the same thing eventually, if not more so. Maybe we thought our ability at copying paper bags and hands, pencils and paints in hand, made us experts at the fraudulent.

After Adolphe Gurkus watched me leave his studio, he went out with a girl and ate two separate dinners, one after the other, to test the validity of his brick of cash at a checker-table-clothed Italian joint in SoHo. Gurkus wanted to know if his stack of bills could actually be exchanged for sustenance.

Another? What is that? A scotch, sir? the waiter said.

No, Gurkus said. I want you to start over. All over. Bring the menus. He may have snapped at the guy. Gurkus was no sweetheart.

The waiter did, in fact, bring the menus. The story goes that before I appeared at Gurkus’ studio, dropped off the dough, and subsequently disappeared, the genius was starving. Literally.

I didn’t know I’d be an unsung art world legend yet, though. But in my office, my mind started to wander to these sorts of future possibilities as I sat behind my office desk and counted, counted, counted. There was an oniony smell in the air, reminding me how The General hadn’t said anything about amounts or directions. He just set a sack of dead presidents on my desk and walked out.

Pardon me: a sack of dead almost-presidents. There were 260 slips of black-and-green-stained paper with the face of Benjamin Franklin smiling back from them. I counted them again. And then I counted them again.

Like Gurkus, I was starving. The gallery was a flop. After the dust soared down the streets of New York and those two huge statues to hope smelt their way into the ground, no one was buying anything, especially art. Artists were on hunger strikes. Remember the 24-hour news cycle back then? You could flick on the TV and see Corliss Bergman chain herself to the front door of the Pelham Museum before its opening of an International Quilts retrospective four days after September 11. No crowd collected outside. No one believed in anything anymore; forget art.

My bill collectors did believe I owed them money. They were happy to send reminders out incessantly. They were also happy to call and make sure I’d received my mail, too. Then they were happy to believe in stacks and stacks of green and white and black bills, with the man I came to call Benny Franks grinning from their fronts.

There were 260 hundreds in the bag. There was $26,000 in the bag.

Up to those moments, I was certain Jade regretted her decision to become my gallery assistant. Back up. I was certain she regretted her decision to become my student in a course in Impressionism at the CUNY Upper East Side Campus and then her decision to meet me for a drink after a midterm. And then of her decision to give me a blowjob in my office, the two of us filled with Southern Comfort garnished with ice and lime. How she must have regretted her decision to follow me out to my Volvo angled in the faculty parking lot afterward, or the one to be my girlfriend, my live-in girlfriend, and then my gallery assistant eventually.

The one thing I was sure of was that Jade was unsure of everything.

So it was the second thing I did. Tell Jade, that is. With $26,000 stacked up in a paper bag, what was left to be unsure of?

Of course, there was a moral dilemma. Later, I looked over my desk at the mishmash of exhibition catalogues and watched Jade count the money. When she asked, Did that man in the jacket? I waved her off.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to help President Bush Part Two or his onion-breathed general do anything. Especially anything connected to a war I was sure we shouldn’t be fighting against people who just coincidentally had beds and pillows, kitchens, and water jugs, all situated above a massive sea of oil. Like many of my friends in the art world, I still called menu items by their God-given names—things like French fries or French toast. Unlike the rest of the United States, which held some sort of idiotic boycott of proper terminology to show solidarity with a lunatic. Like my friends in the art world, I cast a set of skeptical eyes at the stupidest U.S. president in history while he dropped bombs on innocent victims and invented strange words and phrases.

Jade and I were on constant watch back then. When something sailed through the World Wide Web or got caught on CNN, she would duck her head inside my office.

He said, ‘They misunderestimated me.’

Or me, at the breakfast table: "Get this, ‘It’s no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go either way.’ Either way!" I shook my head.

After he performed the menorah lighting ceremony at the White House, she rushed in as I was on the phone ordering packing crates. I covered the mouthpiece.

I just heard, I whispered, I couldn’t imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah!

As I try to pen this memoir, or this half-hearted defense of my actions, and reflect on George W.’s irreverence for the English language, I feel something similar to my thoughts on The General: now there was an artist.

***

Portrait after portrait of Benjamin Franklin slid past Jade’s hands. There was a level of concentration on her face I hadn’t seen since the parking lot on our first date, with the pine tree air freshener bobbing and weaving above her jet-black hair. To call that initial inter-office Volvo interlude a date is a bit of a stretch, I agree. But Jade was as consumed with counting money as she had been as a front-row student during the first half of my course in Impressionism. She was as focused as she’d been when I shared my desire to open my very own gallery over dinner one night.

One of the many things I knew The General was right about was the importance of secrecy in the mission at hand. Even though artists and museums, galleries, and the like were funded by government grants continually, if even a whiff of the notion got out about artists being seeded and grown, sowed and reaped through $100 bills delivered in wrinkled paper bags thanks to Uncle Sam, George W. Bush, The General, and God-knows-who, the whole experiment would fail.

If anything, the artists picked probably had to hate Bush and what America was doing in order to be artists. At least successful ones.

Jade stuck the tip of her little pink tongue out of the side of her mouth. She reminded me of a baccarat dealer in a James Bond movie. I was 007. I was both shaken and stirred, riveted by her focused beauty.

The third thing I did was Google the General.

Guess what happened? Absolutely nothing. The search came back blank.

$26,000, Jade said. I looked up from my computer and the blank Google search. The cursor blinked expectantly.

Do you know how rare it was to produce a blank Google search? Even back then, before they owned the world?

She said, $26,000, again. The emphasis was different. Every syllable had meaning.

Then she said, I guess we can put on another show.

It was a gorgeous understatement.

***

We made love on a field of Benjamin Franklins that night. The money was sticky while we sweated, and the dirty bills clung to my back, to my chest and thighs, and wrinkled along with the bedsheets. Jade’s mouth tasted like hope, and I groaned. We were a mess of fingers and hands, whispers, promises, and urgings, all performed for a bunch of black and green voyeurs. Benjamin Franklin’s face enjoyed us. He agreed with us. He licked and touched and smelled the sweat and lust we bathed in. I could feel Jade’s legs shaking, wrapped around me. I licked her neck and looked into her eyes. Her fingers drew lines down my back with the sharp tips of acrylic nails. I’m coming, someone said. I’m coming.

Later, with the half-light of the city filtering through the upper windows, we weren’t just two fleshy bags, emptied of our usefulness, being stared at by an appreciative and perverted crowd of Benjamin Franklins. It felt like The General was there in bed with us, too. A rendering of his trench coat and paper bag lay beneath our flesh. Jade snored faintly against my shoulder.

She slept, and I stared up at the ceiling with the twin discomforts of her head digging into my shoulder and the oily promissory notes touching me in places they didn’t belong. I didn’t think about paying my lease on the gallery we lived above, the electric bill, my Internet access, the printing costs for the last set of postcards, or even my overdue insurance on the artwork and the space. As Jade snored more and more ferociously, I thought only of fairytales and wishes. I wondered which artist I might touch ever-so-gently with my wand of top-secret government currency and invite to the magic ball.

Chapter 4: The Pre-Sherbet Dreams of Billy Keening

The first person who came to mind was Bill Keening. This was mostly because on my way to Starbucks the next morning, I bumped into the little Norwegian, literally, on his way back from the art store on 73rd Street. Harry’s Supplies was just about the last independent supply house left in the Big Apple, and Billy held a crumpled paper bag from the store in his hand precisely like the kind The General had left on my desk the day before. Billy’s bag had Harry’s written on the side in jet black elephant font, the word a set of tragic wrinkles around those stubby fingers. His sack looked more empty than full.

’Scuse me, ‘scuse me, he said, recovering from the accident.

Then his face lit up. One of the misconceptions about the New York artists is they were all depressed drunkards with the personalities of cobras. Billy was quite the opposite. He had more friends than anyone I knew. He could put away the booze, sure, but Billy was all smiles as we both wondered at the coincidence, rubbing the spots of our respective bumps.

You gotta watch where you’ve been to, he said.

We made small talk. How was my gallery? How was his painting? About 50, Billy had a shock of sharp white hair shooting out above his forehead. He was that Norwegian Nordic blonde, a waning toe head, his command of the language inspired by the movies and TV shows on air when he stowed away on a cruise liner bound for America way back when.

Could be better, we both agreed about our individual work. Except I’m pretty sure Billy said, Could be bester.

Billy was best friends with this Russian guy, Adolphe Gurkus, who I already mentioned bought two meals the night I became his fairy godmother, his genie in the bottle. Gurkus, everyone knew, could paint anything he wanted to. He had riffs and copies of everything from Degas to Cézanne; Picasso to O’Keefe in his studio in SoHo. But the problem was when Gurkus had the chance, all he did was knock off watery imitations of Matisse.

Gurkus beated me again, Billy said. He held up his pitifully empty paper bag.

I assumed it was a show or a sale. Gurkus was one of the few in our circle who had achieved any commercial success. Anytime he ventured beyond a second-generation Matisse or a hard-edged Monet, people bought them. There were rumors of a MoMA purchase somewhere in the near future. There were whispers from the DIA.

You know Harry’s paint shop? The dynamite? he said.

I nodded. Billy shook the empty bag with each pattern from his own brand of word music. Follow the bouncing bag.

I go in and the Harry. The Harry has the sale. Everything on clearing out. I say to him, ‘wait,’ and go gotten my stashes in the studio. Oh, the brushes, the brushes, he said. Billy scanned off to a purple pigeon perched up on a windowsill and smiled. This creamy white oil, like thinking of a cable cooking show, he said. The more, the better, the more the butter. And everything delicious.

It was near lunch hour, and the street was awash with clumps of people pushing to and fro over the black-painted canvas that was Manhattan. Impressionist blobs of red scarves and fleshy blurred faces took their cues from the WALK and DON’T WALK signs and swirled around Billy and me.

I bump into Gurkus like this, he said. He motioned as if they had also literally bumped into one another. This picture in my mind of the two of them was like seeing a yin and yang symbol come to life—Gurkus with his black hair and mustache, his six-and-a-half-foot stature wrapping around Billy’s sea of white. The image brought me back to Jade the night before and the money, the bills sticking to her curvy back, yin and yang tattoo in circles at the base of her spine, the sheets half-covering her liquid skin.

After I return to Harry’s? he said. Nothing left. Not a gosh-darned thing. I got the three brushes Adolphe left me out of pity. Billy pulled them from the bag.

Any disgust or disappointment vanished as he ran his fingers up and down the long stem of the largest brush of the three admiring the product.

Beautiful, beautiful brushes.

Billy could paint. So could the 30 or so people we were close with, drinking at the Mahogany Bar most nights. Yes, Billy was more cheerful, seemed more apt to own color, warp it and make it his own, than most of the people we knew. But more than anything, I think I took his empty paper bag as a sign, Billy holding three brushes in his hand on the crowded street. He