Artist of the Beautiful by Damon LaBarbera

published 1980


THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL
.
(with apologies to the Hawthorne Estate)

Mike stopped typing. He simply could not go on with this drivel. Play writing was simply not son metier. Even in a community college beginning writers course, it was abysmal stuff, the stuff of ridicule. People would laugh at him. He tore the page from his typewriter, crushed it into a convoluted ball, and tossed it at the overflowing wastepaper basket. A bounce and the wad took its place among the other crumpled wads on the floor.

What is my medium, he wondered? He moved  to the mirror hung so abnormally high--because the existing nail had been high on the dormitory wall and he was without hammer, that Mike was always disconcerted to see his face sitting neck-less on the lower edge of the mirror. What is my talent? Today, he noted, the disembodied head looking haggard. Haggard and verging on consumptive.

But then with a sort of mental trick, he began to romanticize  his own trials,  translating his problems into  a sort of specialness. It was a trick he had gotten adept at.  That he suffered was a sign that he was talented. A haggard tired face--but- Ah!, that is the price one pays for Art, for The Higher Life, for Creativity, words that seemed to be spelled in upper case in his mind, yes, that was the price for all the capitalized things that ordinary folk with healthy faces cannot begin to understand. Poe, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Yeats coughing out his lungs, the wan face in the glass belonged to all of them.  His trials were only an indication of some extra sensitivity, some profound superiority. After all, he was one in a million. He stared into his eyes… intelligent eyes, but bloodshot- little red threads forming an unsolvable maze across the whites.

Performing a little trick he had discovered during these examinations, he shifted his gaze so that both eyes were focused on the left’s reflection, while the left eye wandered unfocused. In this way, one could watch oneself in the mirror without being stared back at. It seemed that the reflection was looking forty-five degrees away. This was what he looked like to hundreds of people each day- people in lines, people in classes- it was a revelation. But today the revelation included bloodshot eyes, an unshaven face, greasy hair. And that complexion! Cadaverous! Would a goatee help? Maybe, maybe not, but he did take pride in a gloomy handsomeness in the reflection.

During down days, days where Mike realized that his gloom was falling below its lowest permissible level, he tended towards a self comparison with others in even worse straits, more pain, than he.

Luckily, he had recently read about Rupert Weber, in a short story by a Los Angeles writer famous for drunkenness. Rupert Weber had died (and He, Mike, was in good health) ninety years ago, the electric chair’s first victim. His executioners had rubbed conducting fluid on Rupert’s forehead, wrists, and legs. What could that have been like! They had calculated Weber would die quickly, that a single volt of 2,000 volts would finish him off almost immediately. But they had calculated incorrectly. Rupert took over eight minutes to die.

Mike felt his own arms, their slender grace; and an enthusiasm for life once more began to course through his body. Rupert, he further had read, had buried his ax twenty-nine times in his lover. Mike imagined how miserable Rupert must have felt afterward: such guilt, such knowledge of eventual capture and pain. Much worse than Mike had any right to feel. Rupert was conscious to the last. About thirty witnesses had attended. Several had fainted, and one had remained sick for some time afterward. A good portion had vomited.

Mike looked at his face in the mirror. It would have to be a lot paler before it was the face of a nauseous person. Feeling a bit better he recalled further suffering of the poor Rupert Weber. The first surge of electricity only stunned Weber. His head was smoking. (Smoking!) Fluid dribbled down his legs and arms. Blackened flesh began to peel in strips from the sides of his face. Terrible, terrible tragedy thought Mike, with one part of his mind, while with the other he felt, even though a bit shamefully, better. There! I'm not so bad after all thought Mike after a moment’s reverie on this last fact, I feel much better! It was too bad about poor Rupert Weber, of course, but at least his suffering image was useful as a restorative- which was probably more than he was worth during his lunatic, homicidal lifetime. Anyway, Rupert Weber had died a long time ago, ages ago, which made it illogical to worry about anyway.

Schadenfreude complete, he picked up a penny from the floor and tossed it at a mug filled with sedimentitious, undateable coffee. Rupert made him feel slightly better or at least that he ought to feel slightly better. With a hard percussive sound the penny hit the inside rim and disappeared in the cup. Perfect shot!

At loose ends for a few moments, Mike played with the cat, endeavored to have the cat sniff the cup, and then began flipping through his record collection. Most of the records were rock from the late sixties, when he had been a music enthusiast. He was not conscientious about putting albums back into their jackets- never had been. In fact the records were in terrible shape and were, moreover so uselessly out of date with no longer popular bands that Mike could find nothing to suit his mood. Out of curiosity, he began handling the large 78’s which sat at the back of the box. They had always been there, it seemed---once his parents or an older relative, they were dark, and dustily glittering. Defiantly and quietly they had passed year after year, maybe waiting for some pharoanic resurrection should someone decide to place them on the turntable for one last turn. Brittle, scratched, heavy, he picked up a 78 and placed it on the turntable.

The first song had the vaguely familiar title ”My Heart Belongs To Daddy”. A noise like frying filled the room when he placed the needle down. Then noise arose, some violins stiffly began what sounded like a royal march. After a few paces, the music took a cocky half-step backward, and a naughty, pouting, girlish voice took over.

“I used to fall in love with all
the young men who maul the cuties”

Mike had an idea. He walked to his dresser, prized open bottle of Quaalude, a dosage twice the amount recommended, but not actually dangerous, and certainly not as bad as the laudanum Poe took or the opium Coleridge smoked. Clearing a place for himself amid the undergraduate filth and flotsam piled high on his bed; Mike fell backwards and listened to the song, now sung with mock primness with a flirty voice

But now I tell
Each young gazelle
To go to he-e-e
-I mean Hades


Strange about these drugs, he thought. The mind remains the same, or so it seemed; it was only the body that became sluggish. His individuality, his spiritual and aesthetic longings would appear intact through the harshest pharmacological assaults. He remained clear; if it had not been for the sluggish feel of his body, he would never have suspected that these mind drugs were anything more than placebos. The cute, coy voice sang on, clarinets playing around its melody.


When tearing off a game of golf, I may make a play for the caddy
but when I do, I don't follow through cause my heart belongs to Daddy


The oldness of the song appealed vaguely to him. He felt more relaxed. But he had to admit the deception of these drugs and his apparent lucidity. His psyche was subservient to a slowing heartbeat, a depressed portion of the brain, muscle relaxation. His mind was like the captain of a ship gong about his usual duties with precision, while the vessel- the body- slowly sank deeper and deeper into an ocean of indifference.

He listened, looking up in the air from his bed. When he had chosen “My Heart Belongs To Daddy”, Mike had readied his Freudian arsenal for a full scale Oedipal analysis of the song. As it turned out, Daddy was a sugar daddy- one of those older rich mean who subsidize young nymphets for their own obscure psychological and physical gratifications. The sugar daddy was, no doubt, a puffy and ill-smelling gut sack- but women's taste was a great puzzle, a puzzle he had nowhere near figured out.

The nuances of baby’s voice began to speak volumes about erotic ploy. Her naive sexuality, her fatuous belief in her man manipulating powers came through in the voice. Mike tried to imagine the figure of the amorous millionaire, but the only things that came to mind were the portly figures on the Community Chest Cards in Monopoly; judging beauty contests, visiting the opera with bank notes escaping all the while from their pockets.

If I invite a boy some night
To dine on my fine finnan haddie
I just adore his asking for more
But my heart belongs to Daddy

Mike suddenly became indignant. Here was a girl, a not very bright girl, uneducated no doubt, having the time of her life while he, undoubtedly more intelligent that she, was stuck with these damn poems, novels and philosophies, going nowhere. He looked with disgust at the piles of papers and books on his desk. Why, she couldn’t be much older than a freshman! His temper momentarily softened when he remembered that by now the lady was probably rotting in a nursing home, more likely dead. But still!, it wasn’t fair! She probably never even touched Plato! Imagine her lifestyle with that old rich gut sack!


And then Mike recalled, suddenly, with a start, that his writing, his art, his aspirations were supposed to be the sole consolations in a world he, and Poe, and Rimbaud despised, yes truly despised because of its callousness, its tawdriness, its cheap disregard for all that is beautiful. The young lady was to be pitied. With the gentle smile of a man who forgivingly accepts the insults of the world, he looked lovingly at his newest creation, a painting called “The Boy Who Never Grows Old.”

“The boy who never grows old was a large drawing of Peter Pan, a pastel he had finished only a a few days ago and had hung in place of a nude self-portrait which had elicited comments in another language when those Italian plasterers had come to fix his ceiling.

In this new drawing Mike hoped to capture the carefree impishness of youth, and had planned that the figure, clothed in forest green, would have a mischievous expression, with perhaps a winking eye and a taunting smile, emblematic of the saucy freedom of youth. Aware of the vast power of the unconsciousness, Mike had quite deliberately tried to introduce subtle elements of androgyny into the painting, hoping in this way to exploit any observer’s peculiar tendencies, be witting or unwitting.

The painting, however, had not been a complete success. Instead of the impish pixie, a rather sluttish-looking apparition- some impossibly gendered creature fresh from a pre-War Berlin nightclub leered from the canvass. The monster’s faces was blurred, the mouth a gash. Instead of the taunting smile, there was a salacious gloat; the eyes had given him trouble, and had to be drawn and redrawn and the result was that the one eye which was supposed to be a winking looked a bit swollen. The legs were the uneven sticks of a polio victim, and one did not get the impression that Peter Pan was wearing green tights, but that his skin had turned a ghastly hue. Next time he would stick to a fruit bow.


Pastel dust wafted gently from the painting as the pen Mike threw a pen at it. Maybe acrylics would work better. Or better yet, why not forget painting all together? It, too, was not son metier.