Put Your Kids to Work — Sean Hooks

“Really, the thing you have to appreciate is, no one knows how to talk to children. It’s cross-species communication. It’s like trying to converse with an ape, or a dolphin, or a tree.” Gina sat on the black leather couch in my loft, her left heel on her right thigh, her shoes discarded, her windbreaker removed. She wore a lime-green polo shirt with an elephant as its miniature crest. She refused, as always, because she’s allergic, to pet my dachshund, Bergman. Acknowledged but unpetted, he retreated to his circular doggie bed. “The other day, my ex was over, Pieter, and he asked my daughter what she wanted for Christmas and she said: ‘I am a genius. I am a genius on the drums. Therefore I do not want a drum set for Christmas. I already have one.’ Then she paused and said, ‘Mommies will have drinks for Christmas.’”

“I don’t understand.” I looked at my personal assistant, a woman who used to be straight as I used to be gay. “That’s a rational-sounding child. She stated what she didn’t want. And something she’s heard around the house about her mothers enjoying drinks during the holidays. You’re not imbibing in an untoward way in front of her, I assume. Your duties have not driven you to the bottle, have they? Frazzled and forlorn and slugging back Early Times whisky in the middle of the day? You and Terry smuggling miniatures of sambuca and Jäger into a midnight-midtown showing of Barbie inside your purse?” I chose not to talk uninterruptedly on and risk coming across as an employer implying that his employee’s daughter was astute and that his employee was a burgeoning dipsomaniac. I looked at Gina’s fingers, gnarled, her fingernails, bitten and chewed and paintless, the rest of her a paragon of composed vigor.

“We drink like normal people, Jefe. And I came all this way through the tunnel traffic to bring your notebooks and photo albums and canvases, so be nice.”

I do not say: Niceness is a plague; I’m paying you, woman. “And to get away from your living quarters, empty save for a smattering of children’s toys, mostly plastic musical instruments in loud colors, and wine glasses stickied with lip gloss.”

A laugh from my assistant.

“How old is Emma again?” I knew her daughter was close in age to my own.

“Turned four back in March.” Gina had carried their child, the sperm donor a gay man from her grad school days at Tulane, Chris, a Chinese-Canadian gentleman who now lectures at the University of British Columbia.

I looked around my Jersey City loft, a partial view of the skyline across the river. “Not much in the way of plastic toys here. Tiphanie loves most of all my pots and pans. Arranging the lids like, well, a drum set. She asks for the long wooden spoon. The single drumstick approach.”

“I loved to bang pots and pans when I was a kid. I don’t actually remember that, but my mother tells me so.”

I have not met Gina’s mother, but she’s presented as a sort of benevolent, well-meaning harridan. Gina is thirty-eight, seven years short of me on the life journey.

“Thanks for having me at your opening without having to be working,” Gina says, not for the first time; she’s a multi-thanker. “We both thought it was lovely, even though you mostly hid in that side room. Everyone was wishing you could find it in you to move back to The City. It feels like I’m moving your things in the wrong direction, westward across the Hudson in the back of Terry’s old Jeep I can barely drive with the manual transmission.”

What could anyone do but feel crass? Single dad in Jersey. Proud papa with custody three days a week. Assistant’s daughter already sure she will become a musical genius. I receive reviews in the paper of record, invitations to basels and biennales that I turn down, the sale of a canvas last month for six figures, a solo museum exhibition, but these so-called accomplishments feel good for half a day and then it’s back to drinking Keurig coffee and staring into space with fewer ideas for new work than ever.

I try not to rely too heavily on Tiphanie’s mother, Gwen, nor on Maria the nanny slash maid slash woman who fellated me one time. I paid her an extra hundred that week and told her “Never again” and we’ve both stuck to it.

The unpretentiousness of the humble El Salvadoran woman, a believer in God. It’s hard to explain how much this contributes to me feeling like a crass bridge-and-tunnel boy who used to be blownby men in bathrooms on the lower east side while songs by Tricky or Portishead played in the background and ecstasy or cocaine or trippy drugs (anything but pills) coursed through us in the much-nostalgized ‘90s.

“I appreciate your bringing my needed remnants. Collating and collecting the things. You’re a good person, not just a good worker. I want you to know that. Always.”

Gina has been in my employ for eight years. I had assistants before her, but they were graduate students and aspirants, brownnosers and incompetents.

“Honestly, Jefe, other than commit a murder or pet your dog, there simply isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you. Or Tiphanie.”

“Make me a sandwich then. Please.”

“Maria makes better meals, you always say.”

“I don’t want to wait for tomorrow. And a sandwich is not a meal.”

“‘The Demanding Boy.’ Silver gelatin black and white.” She snapped an imaginary photo of me, uncrossed her legs, placed her palms on her knees, pushed up into a standing position, and went to the refrigerator.

“Just warm up the cold chicken in the Tupperware. I got a fresh baguette this morning.”

She saw it on the countertop next to the cast-iron Acorn stove by the circa-1940 Chinese blue-and-white porcelain bowl with the bananas and the avocados and the clementines. “From Thatcher’s Bakery! How can you stand waiting in that line?”

“I don’t wait in line, you lummox.”

“Ah, yes, lines are for plebeians, not famous artists fleeing from lower Manhattan to Joisey.”

“Pah! Famous-ish. At best.”

Gina was born down the shore, some place called Little Silver, the salt water taffy lands. She made a chicken parm hero because I had sauce and mozzarella. Her polo fit taut against her negligible chest, her look that of a former dancer now teaching at an all-girls private school in The City. A siren outside sent Bergman into a fit of barking, which we ignored. He thinks he’s a dalmatian whenever he hears sirens.

I met Gina in Verona (a bougie township in Essex County, NJ) when I was doing my homeowner thing. The yard, the pool. The family man. Trying to create the myth I’d been deprived of in my own childhood. She’d been offered a position assisting some writer, a biographer, but instead she took the job with me. Her brother Rafe introduced me. He was my next-door neighbor back when I had giant flatscreen TVs and hosted my old friends in something I refused to call a mancave. I never stopped liking football, even when I went through my gay and bi phases. The last term I used unironically before settling into non-queer white dude in his 40s was “heteroflexible,” on a dating site I read about in The New Yorker. I have since deleted all my dating apps. The only social I have is Twitter, or whatever Elmo is calling it this week. Gina runs it for me. Doesn’t even ask me anymore what to post. It’s enchanting to be free of it.

The Verona house has four bedrooms and a finished basement. The loft space has zero bedrooms and pigeon shit in high quantities on the rooftop-adjacent balcony. It makes Maria exclaim things in Spanish. Jersey City in the ‘90s did not have many pseudo-bohemian white people. I doubt we’ve made it better but I don’t think we’ve made it worse. Weed is legal now. There are more beer gardens and health food stores. The soul food spot with the jerk chicken and the Polish butcher where I get the kielbasa have not been gentrified out.

I recently tried to teach Tiphanie the meaning of the word “inexorable.” She said “I don’t want to be in terrible” and curled up on the couch with Bergman, whose “g” she does not pronounce. I like very much the music of Silver Jews and of course the films of the auteur I named my dog after. Gwen doesn’t like dogs. She’s not allergic, just partial to cats. She tolerated Bergman because he was a small dog. Said he was aesthetically handsome but smelled bad, like all dogs. She didn’t give very good fellatio. A flight attendant when I met her, now she’s doing real estate.

Gina got here late, by her standards, just after noon. It was as if she had walked into a cottage in Ireland and found Joyce writing a novel or Yeats writing a poem. I have terrible fits of grandeur. I’m mostly Irish-American but my inspiration is Miss Agnes Martin, a Scot from Saskatchewan.

I was staring at a primed canvas behind the screen that sections off my mini-studio and did not bother to look up when Gina came in. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Bergman opened one eye from his bed in the corner opposite my studio space, which I can see if I’m in my rocking chair and I lean my tilt just so.

After three times up and back—I helped, so six loads of notebooks, photo albums, and small canvasses—on her last solo trip up from the Jeep, Gina carried with her only a Starbucks atrocity in a polyethylene cup and a biography of Warhol, 900-plus pages in hardcover. This is my steadfast employee who is now my friend, I thought to myself with trepidation for my future and the future of my only child, named Tiphanie by her stewardess mother who now lazes in that house in Verona, her prize. Rafe still lives next door, still in my fantasy football league.

Her tits were perfect and she was my muse—vomit-inducing word—and Gwen let my chums come over and served us drinks while we watched the football games in the finished basement with some of my art on the walls, except in the bathroom where the area behind the commode featured blowups of Barney and Waters, both in suits. In summer, Gwen swam in the pool in her bikini when said chums came over and we talked not football but Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Foucault, and they envied her toned body and smiling face and traditionalistic midwestern airs, the same airs disdained during visits by the art crowd from The City—hobnobbers and acolytes, non-chums, gay men and gay women mostly, people who wore a lot of black and thought I was doing it all ironically, living in the suburbs with a woman they probably called a bimbo, but who’s always reminded me of Babitz.

Gwen hails from Ohio. Her family is tedious, and unbearably cheap. She’s a good mother. She reads mostly mysteries, but she reads. I admit there was a trophy quality there, but we both liked to dance. We’d sing to Tiphanie, which we still do individually, and Tiphanie sings along. Gwen likes to sing Katy and Taylor, Lana and Lorde. I always do “The Times They are A-Changin’,” and I’ve been learning “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” watching acoustic guitar tutorials on YouTube like a sappy daddy. Tiphanie is lately liking ska music. I have seen Gwen’s videos where my daughter dances the ska dances in ways that might make her internet-famous were we the type of parents to post videos of our child to places where strangers could ogle her.

All artists have both a conservative streak and a mystical streak.

“I love your work,” they say.

Gwen and I were both social climbers. Me from the working-class burgs of the Nutmeg State, she originally from Mansfield and at other points in her life Cleveland and Columbus.

I have a friend whose last name is Pham and he has a connection at New York Review of Books; we’re conspiring to get my memoir published. My book will be called Writings, named after the one and only book by Agnes Martin.

I wish Gina would have made a simple grilled cheese with sliced tomato. I wish she had not brought Starbucks into my living space. I’m not ashamed to have a black leather couch. I’ve never dealt cocaine, and I’m now too old to use it. Cocaine is a young person’s drug. At least she made the sandwich big enough that I can reheat the other half for dinner, or more likely a quarter for dinner and another quarter for lunch tomorrow.

“Thank you for doing this,” they say.

“Do you like living in New Jersey?” they say.

“At least you can see The City from here,” they say, the ones who’ve visited in my first two months here. I moved in September, just before my birthday. “That house in the sticks,” they said of Verona, “off route whatever and make a left turn after the diner? I don’t know, that’s…that was…I can see getting away…the seclusion…a backyard with a pool, but I hear you had parties with New Jersey people where you drank beers in thin cans, and Trulys and White Claws, and diving headfirst into chlorinated water in the summertime, where you could hurt your head or neck…”

I was interred in an asylum in my teens. That’s why any drug except pills. The night nurses fed us pills, the day nurses fed us therapy sessions. It’s called a psychiatric hospital now. They changed the verbiage not long after I was admitted. My parents are both dead and I’m happy about that. They put me there. They could speak German. I cannot. I’m one quarter German and three quarters Irish. “Skin cancer is more deadly than the couf,” I told the Covid worrywarts.

I write with an expensive pen—an LV campaign I turned down, they gifted it to me expecting a yes—in a simple college-ruled one-subject. Made in Indonesia, it says on the cover, distributed out of Edgewood, New York. I’m on the third one. Yellow. Before that were red and green. Next will be purple. Then black. Then I will be done. I don’t want it published in five volumes, that’s just how many notebooks I know it will take. Writings will be one volume, sections labelled I, II, III, IV, and V, with no chapter titles or headings.

“Don’t let me disturb you, Jefe.” Gina with that Melville-appropriating Starbucks cup, that abortion of a cappuccino warmed up in my microwave. Gina has never been in my bed. I think she adores me while not at all understanding me. That’s a good way to be for friends where one is also paying the other to perform tasks. They are not remedial tasks, they are essential to my career, much as I hate that word, a Gen X’er who grew up terrified of the term “selling out” and even more repudiatory of that worst of all epithets, “careerist.”

They say, “I love your work.” They do not say, “I love you.”

“Just had my last cigarette of the day,” Gina said.

She doesn’t like my balcony. She says she likes to smoke on the street, whatever that means.

“I’m only smoking in the mornings,” she continued. “Three or four ciggies. Once noon arrives, it’s just caffeine and sadness.”

Gina looks like a more buff Marisa Tomei. The arms of a rower or softball player who works out six days a week. Gina went to Parsons. Lives in Dumbo with a roommate named Angel, as in Ahn-hell, a husky male human who grew up in Jersey and works a janitorial job in a corporate office building, One Liberty Plaza in the financial district. He thought he was gay for a while but now identifies as asexual. I’m told he gets along very well with Emma on the days that Gina has her. She alternates Tue and Wed with Sat and Sun, two days in a row every week; I have Tiphanie every Mon, Wed, Fri.

I learned how to drive in my twenties, a strapping older lover who called himself Tex taught me in empty Staten Island parking lots, but I never grew fond of it. Subterranean subway man and PATH train taker was always my preference, though I pay to have us driven to Verona in a Continental, by a former police officer named Julio, and on returning my daughter to her mother I get out to stretch my legs, look at the house, now Gwen’s, chat with her for a few minutes about what Tiphanie and I read or listened to on the way over, wave to Rafe or a passing pedestrian, and then Julio drives me back to my artist’s loft in J.C. Julio is in my fantasy football league too. He tends to be the first to draft a quarterback. His team’s middle of the pack this season.

Gina will be the one who tells my story. She will have final edit or whatever the publishers call it. Whichever editor we get—whether at NYRB or elsewhere, I trust Pham to choose, they worked at a literary agency when they were younger—Gina’s discretion can overrule, that will be in the contract. Once I get through the notebooks, I wonder how old Tiphanie will be. Ten? Twenty? Still five, like now, if I fill them by the end of this year, the year of ‘23, which reminds me of Jordan though I’m far more interested in football than basketball. Mike was and is an icon. I like icons.

An awkward stance Gina has, feet just a bit too far apart. Tiphanie stands with legs akimbo. Bergman stands with a great deal of dignity. Gwen stands impatiently. Angel, the few times I’ve met him, stands like a janitor. Julio stands like an ex-cop. Maria stands with a noble bearing but just the slightest bit defensively arranged, like someone who’s been assaulted in her past. Gina’s partner Terry stands like a princess, a princess with a tribadic mullet.

Terry’s in the fantasy league. Says she misses the basement Sundays in Verona. She’s currently in first place. Works the waiver wire like a maestro.

Terry introduced me to artists I’ve supported and financed and empowered (and whose work I love), like Deana and Jammie and Kelley.

At the opening, Terry wore a chartreuse polo shirt with no logo on its breast, ankle-high socks in black, green, and white stripes, low black boots, black flounce skirt, black hair in cornrows, and skin like, oh, let us say like an Irish cappuccino, not from Starbucks, and that militant air exuded by certain (I can’t same rhymes with “tykes,” I’m not allowed, nor am I allowed to compare her skin to something that rhymes with “coca” and “Boca”) but Terry also sometimes wears bespoke suits. She thinks she’s the POC Chloë Sevigny. I see her more as a POC Selma Blair. I’m betrothed to the 1990s. Terry knows Gerwig and her non-husband. They came to my opening last year. They said they loved my work. I said I didn’t know which was more loathsome, Park Slope or Sacramento. They laughed, though I wasn’t joking. At least they were aware of the works of Thiebaud. Noah said he liked the ice cream cones. Greta said the cake slices, which is the correct answer.

I hope my daughter maintains her innocence as long as she can. She loves to sit on the hassock in the center of the loft by the coffee table piled with books (Ruscha, Penn, Hughes, Walker) that she sometimes removes and restacks on the floor. The hassock is never allowed to have anything on it. It’s her special area. She straightens her back and says, “I’m on my magic carpet, Daddy.” Then she pilots it through imaginary worlds, thwarting the schemes of imaginary evildoers.

Some nights I weep as I recall her happiness, up there holding out her pudgy little arms like wings.

“Why do you need wings?” I asked once. “Doesn’t a magic carpet just fly by, y’know, magic?”

“Magic carpets don’t need steering wheels but they still need steering,” was her attorney-like response.

I never got to meet Sontag or Reed. I have no desire to meet P.S.

I never got to meet Motherwell but I met Frankenthaler in Beverly Hills, almost twenty years ago already. His work dirges, hers bops. Their canvases have better titles than mine, but they seem to be searching for meaning with a capital “M.” They were interested in social issues. In causes. Ochre > elegies is my POV.

I have no “inner circle.” I scoff at interviewers who use phrases like “your new direction” or who lean into the word “reinvent” or who ask about “controlled structures in service of the free play of visual energies.” This attitude apparently makes some of the people (on the internet and elsewhere) hate me more, but it makes others love me more, my intolerance for nonsense.

I do not listen to podcasts.

Recent interviewers have asked me about men named Rogan and Thiel and a book publishing company called Catapult and a woman from the Carolinas named Dasal. I told them I honestly don’t know these things. They say I’m aligning myself with Maher and Peterson and others— bad people who I should declare myself a strident enemy of, but I don’t know and don’t care who they are. I know running backs, I tell them. I know Bijan Robinson. I know Rhamondre Stevenson. I know Tony Pollard and Alexander Mattison, whose names remind me of Pollock’s and Hamilton’s.

The editor we’re targeting at NYRB is named Wyatt or White a POC, though I’m not quite sure if Asians and Indians count, and he’s of the latter extraction, India the subcontinent and country. I’ve been told not to say “model minority” but I don’t understand what’s so bad about open discussion. Can’t I appreciate both intersectionality and elitism? I like some of the things they do at The New School. A panel on “The Discourse of Segregation in the Arts,” why not? No better or worse than a discussion of Bridget’s op art lines at the Morgan Library (free drinks! please RSVP!) or a documentary screening about Ray’s bunnies at Film Forum (free popcorn! buy a kitschy magnet!).

Now that Gina doesn’t use the balcony in the afternoons to smoke and complain about the pigeons, she talks at me of things like Lululemon and Pinkberry and a TV show called The Bear. Thinks she’s educating me about The Clash and R.E.M. and The Replacements because she’s relistening to them and I’m in a classical-music phase.

I will never let them lock me up again. I will drain my accounts and max out my credit cards and hide in Istanbul, in Moda. I visited there, summer 2020, as soon as I could. When they kick at your front door, how you gonna come? I have my pistols that I keep in a locked safe beneath my bed. The Browning .380 with the rosewood grip is my favorite.

I was once called “the fame-kissed wunderkind.” I was once called “the next Schnabel.” I was once called “an enfant terrible with a face like a cracked mirror, institutionalized as a teenager, the subject of a 10,000-word essay in Frieze by the time he was twenty-five.” I am now forty-five.

Americans are friendly but insincere. I don’t want Tiphanie growing up around them. At this age I have some influence, but later? As she attends a boarding school, or moves to Los Angeles, or dabbles in religion. Then what?

Gwen has a music box that plays “Für Elise.” I have never asked but have always wondered whether she knows the name of the composition, of its composer. A goal of hers is to make enough money in real estate to own a pastry shoppe and become an icier. I know at the very least she will never move back to Ohio.

An ex from my gay days, Tito, his schnauzer Felix died in Tito’s bathroom. Tito came home from the gym, went to take his shower, and saw his dog’s corpse curled around the drain. A standup shower, not a bathtub, and far from what they now call a “walk-in.” He lived in a tiny apartment in the back section of Hoboken, by the viaduct. He tried too hard in bed, a noisemaker. A strong back, hairless, his physique the sought-after inverted triangle, worked as a lifeguard at Jones Beach in the summers and was the bottom in our relationship. Cried for days over the loss of Felix the schnauzer.

Tito’s favorite movie was Back to School. Its zaniness. Its ambered 1980s quality. Stodgy old white guys vs. nouveau-riche Rodney upsetting their order, a subversive alongside the spoiled Hollywood child, the acting savant, and the working-class faces of Beatty, Young, and Walsh. An appearance by a then-living Vonnegut. Tito would get tipsy and quote it aloud. “Mellon, we need ya’! Get your suit on!” or “We’re pointing out that a violent ground acquisition game such as football is in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war.” Tito loved Hungarian food. I think of him when I pass this bistro called Greenpears. It opened in 2021. I wonder how long it will stay in business. I wonder where Tito is now. I will not go on the Facebook to find him. And yes, he drank Tito’s vodka. He smoked Marlboro reds. Anal sex details will not go in my memoir.

- - -

The gleaming black flatscreen TV is an American triumph even though they’re built in Asia. Vizio is an American company but none of their products are made here. Zenith was the last American manufacturer of televisions. They have not existed since the 1990s. will write wildly and enthusiastically but never impulsively, always controlled, like my canvases, my post-Agnes works which others have called masterworks but which I think of as barely works at all.

I will not quote people in my memoir. I will not out people in my memoir. I will tell stories. About partying in the bathroom at KGB Bar. About readings at Cornelia Street Café. About concerts at Roseland. About showings of my work at Pruitt’s flea market and Gavin’s enterprise. About debating art and literature outside The Strand, philosophy and politics inside Brazenhead. About nightcaps at Siberia and Ryan’s Irish Pub. About pierogis and borscht from Veselka before bed.I

After the opening, and after Julio dropped off Terry, Gina invited me in. Angel was there so we had a drink with him. He said he didn’t like Tito’s vodka and I asked him why. He said he prefers Stoli and Absolut because Tito’s is too smooth, no bite. I did not ask him for further details, but I very much admired the specificity. I know most of my peers and colleagues consider my taste in things to be middlebrow, especially for an artist, but Keurig coffee, for example, is proletarian in a way that Starbucks or third-wave single-origin pourovers from Kenya are not. And fantasy football is fun. It gives people joy. It brings them together. Keeps them together. There is very very real joy in that simulacrum competition, the shit-talking emails and texts, the busting of balls or chops. Other than my daughter, not much brings me joy.

In my loft, after I’d eaten half of half of the chicken parm and she the other half of half, Gina said, “I think we should do something. Go out.”

“Like what?” I asked, feeling like Jerry or Elaine, wondering if I would allow myself to be dragged to a park or a street festival, that antique store she likes over by Jersey Social or that barcade near the Grove Street PATH station full of old coin-ops like Punch-Out!! and Centipede and Dig-Dug and Gauntlet with their gallimaufry of IPAs on tap.

- - -

They babble at me on phones, in voicemails, and apparently over Social the Media, which is spoken of as a vassal. They blither about conferences, readings, lectures, visiting positions. Artforum and Hyperallergic. Emoluments and offers. Siglio. Phaedon. Abrams. Taschen. Radius. No, I tell them, I want to publish words. But not just yet.

My illustrations will accompany, as they do in Agnes, though she published in two languages. I cannot write in German. My most “prestigious” canvas is untitled but it’s known as Berlin Palimpsest. Gerhard, per his personal assistant, supposedly called it “a gauge for our times.” He saw it at a gallery in Red Hook. That was before Gerhard divorced his artist wife who became an alcoholic.

- - -

“I’d rather hear the thoughts of the man on the street. Or the woman on the street. Or the nonbinary person on the street,” I answered an interviewer recently. “My canvases don’t need the approval of the wannabe Schjeldahls or the authorization of the lionized.” Lionized. Ha!

When my daughter is a grown woman, or a grown man, or a grown nonbinary person, or at least a teenager with a regrettable haircut, bangs I can foresee, perhaps she will laugh at that line too. My chutzpah, my moxie, her father’s irascible wit, it will make her laugh a single curt Ha!

She will know how I’ve orchestrated my days around her, and how precious our love, our bond. She will prefer my Writings to my canvases. She will not have to spend her life hustling. Give them enough to do something but not enough to do nothing. I have an amount to leave behind, a sum, small by some standards, like Gerhard’s, but it will be hers and hers alone.

Assets and markets. Translations in languages used abroad, overseas, outside of The States. Outside of New Jersey, which as of right now is the last state where it’s illegal to pump your own gasoline. I would hate for Tiphanie to have to pump gas. Almost as much as I hate speed bumps, or censorship, or the Americans who think that voting in presidential elections matters.

My book will besiege. My canvases they say both comfort and discomfort. Ice picks. Frozen seas within us. Upsetting the comfortable and comforting the oppressed.

Intellectuals who care not about the life of the mind but who care above all about Success, they are my enemies.

Thoreau said that a successful life knows no laws.

The great German modernist defined success as an inner and indescribable force, a powerful vision, a consciousness that you are exerting pressure on the movement of life, adapting life to your own ends. Fortune and success lie within ourselves, he wrote. Within ourselves. Agnes agreed.

Mr. Zimmerman from Minnesota said security and success mean absolutely nothing.

One of the James brothers called success The Bitch Goddess. The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of success, he said, or wrote, that is our national disease. Success as nasty, as reductive, as coarse, as dehumanizing. As square.

When asked about his “massive success” as an artist, Gerhard said, “It’s just as absurd as the banking crisis. It’s impossible to understand. It’s daft.”

As a parent, I’m not so careful about things others fear. By age one, I let her walk around by herself, no walkers or saucers. She stumbled on concrete. She stubbed a toe. She skinned a knee. An arm needed rubbing but not bone setting. She ate dirt. She swallowed pennies. She never scarred her face. She never cut her head open. She never lost her eye on the corner of a table. Children know how to fall.

I put her in a regular chair, not a highchair, much earlier than the other children in the diner or restaurant or café. I decline that booster seat they offer. I don’t dilute her juice with water. I don’t order the gluten-free doughnuts. We eat cinnamon sugar. We eat croissants. Not so many as to make ourselves obese, but we smile our big father-daughter smiles and occasionally even order a milkshake. And fuck you if you disagree with our happiness.

In the nuthouse, I was not yet an adult so I had no rights. The only thing I could stomach in that place was the applesauce. Now I cook pork chops and make fresh applesauce for myself and my Tiphanie, one of the only meals I make well. Though we are not in public, we smile like heathens then too.

The magic carpet will carry her on. Perhaps, years from now, she will recall her father’s Jersey City loft, will refer to the hassock as a place of imagination cultivated by a caring dad.

Perhaps she will smoke Marlboros and drink vodka with bite.

I’m not holding madness at bay. I’m in my right mind. I don’t have credit card debt. Just a debit card and my checking and savings accounts at Bank of America, and on Coinbase a few of these cryptocurrencies the young folks like.

I wish I were a filmmaker so I could make a “cult classic.” I wish I could have played a stevedore on the docks like Brando. I wish I could have punted a boat in Venice in the nineteenth century. I wish I could have lived in Dante’s Florence, not Shakespeare’s London. I would have liked to live at least for a short time in Donald’s Marfa or Cormac’s El Paso. I have lived briefly in Taos, but it’s not for me, too hippie new age turquoise, though the Native Americans, Pueblo tribe, if I remember correctly, were very very kind to me despite having no idea who I was. They seemed to understand the tourbillion that is my art.

Who will explore the box of file cards with my ideas on them, most of which never became canvases? White Water Duck in Orange Flamescape Inspired by the Horse in Picasso’s Guernica but the Whole Thing Resembles Most of All a Creamsicle is one I don’t think I will get around to. Maybe one of the acolytes will come across it in the Harry Ransom Center or the Newark Public Library, in Paris or Barcelona, in Westford, Massachusetts or in the Harwood Museum of Art.

I will never be tended to by nurses and orderlies while lying in a bed and staring at an analog wall clock and waiting for them to change the bedpan.

I will miss the fantasy football drafts. I will miss the beautiful breasts and the beautiful cocks. I will miss letting my daughter have a sip of my coffee and the judgmental faces people make in my periphery.

“Politeness,” said an effusive Gina. “Sincere mother fucking politeness, that used to be a thing, didn’t it? In America. In the world. On this side of the Hudson River or the other. It wasn’t so damned regretful and prerequisite, muttered by sullen teenagers and college kids and people who think they’re too good for work because they’re squired around like princelings, like baronesses. They used to explain to you the bill of fare, the blue plate special, the soup of the day. Now they expect you to tell them, to beg and grovel, to ask their fucking permission. They think their wages meager and wonder why you’re angry that they don’t accept cash, then they expect you to type in a tip on a little white box with a little black screen.”

“All those swiping cards,” I concurred. “Every day. Surveilled by overlords. And we wonder why it’s such a mess. The retirement of coins and bills. The artificial glow of screens. The loss of ambience.”

Gina referred to a study that says American 18-year-olds today are like 12-year-olds from the recent past. She said they have food allergies and attention disorders and mental health diagnoses, and it’s all because of the cell phones their parents kept in their pockets next to their ovaries and testicles.

I referred to Jasper’s flags, to Georgia’s flowers and skulls. I may have used the words “ascetic” and “monkish.”

I didn’t refer to Brian (born here in Jersey City, just a couple years before me) and his Companion sculptures or to Balloon Dog Jeff, but I don’t hate their art. They’re like terriers.

Merit. It didn’t used to be a controversial position. To prefer subtle ostentations to gratuitous ostentations. Marvelous Sugar Baby > Piss Christ.

Gina mentioned her friend Yuki the composer slash artist who looks the part but whose canvases inspire in me nothing but dread. And not the good kind, the DeLillo kind.

I recently asked a publicist for DeLillo’s email and was told he communicates by fax. It made me want to jerk off to the mental image of a naked man more than anything had in a decade. Don would be a dirty talker, would like it rough. Though he probably prefers fantasy baseball to fantasy football.

Maybe the best writers and artists are just obsessives. We were raised in backseats, not carseats. Lynch says the most important contribution to his art was his mother’s refusal to give him coloring books. No lines. No restrictions. Blank slate. Blank page. Blank canvas. I use lined paper for my words, but I’m aware of the thing about writing the other way, against the lines; that sentiment abides even if my words are written within them, the paper not from Assouline or Muji or the detestable little Moleskine, but instead bought at an urban CVS or Walgreens for less than two American dollars.

“You used to have ridiculous arguments with your former dealer,” said Gina. I knew she was jealous of Rita because they had similar names and Rita had the more enviable hair. Cascading locks. Oversized glasses. Tendentious Rita. Not synergized with my aims. Though Rita did love the art writing of Hickey from Fort Worth, a mensch and a badass with his air guitars and his invisible dragons.

“I needed you, not her. An assistant, not a dealer, not an agent, not reps and greed pigs and remora fish. Always been a free agent, an autonomous being. But I need my Girl Friday. I don’t need a pencil pusher or a tidy waitress. The wheeler-dealers have always exhausted my patience. They smell of chemicals, of dry cleaning fluid.”

“Tetrachloroethylene,” said Gina, languid in her repose.

A good title for a work. About to mention Rita’s hair, I showed restraint. If I’ve learned anything about women, it’s not to compare them to other women, at least not to their face. In a bar or a basement while watching football with other men or occasionally a lesbian or one of those super-logical women who might secretly be a high-end prostitute like in The Girlfriend Experience, the ones who service the dipshit politicians. Yes, in suburban basements or in catty gay bars. Frivolous catty, not actually harmful. Mostly, I don’t say something that might upset my friend Gina because I’m a kind and gentle man and it’s my daughter who has made me this way. I used to be a curmudgeon, a misanthrope. Now I have love in my heart. Ha!

- - -

Word games with my daughter provide a grace that downright shimmers. “Tiphanie,” I said last week, pointing to an orange, “what is it not?”

“It is not an apple, Daddy. It is not a banana. It is not a peach. It is not a pear. It is not a pomegranate. It is not a persimmon.” I pointed to a square. “Square is not a circle.” I pointed to Bergman. “Berman is not a cat, or a giraffe, or a gibbon, or a human being.”

“Your father,” I used the snooty voice I use when I make fun of people in academe, “does not make abstract art. He does not paint stripe paintings. He is not a minimalist. He is not doing spare geometry. He is not postmodern. He is not incarnating tristesse. I like John Cage, I like Japanese woodblocks, I like landscapes, but Daddy is not a composer, Daddy is not a designer in the ukiyo-e style, Daddy is not part of the Hudson River school or of any school.” I hope one day soon to point to a school building and hear Tiphanie say, “It is not a place of learning, Daddy.”

“‘Stop studying, start making,’ I was once instructed. I listened. I waited for more,” I told Gina as the afternoon wore on.

“What happened then, Jefe?” Exaggerated big-eyed rapture for my benefit.

“My Teacher,” never a mentor, a teacher was good enough, “crossed his arms to indicate that he was finished speaking and as I went to the counter to place my order and he went back to reading the poems he was perusing when I’d approached him and snuck a glimpse at his open book and the words stuck with me. The poem opened with lines about how no man knows what he will sing at the end, watching the pier as the ship sails away. My Teacher was alone at a table at a café on Fifteenth Street where he’d just lost a game of chess to a local wastrel in a faded black Rolling Stones t-shirt with the lips logo on it. The wastrel waved goodbye like My Teacher was his favorite uncle and My Teacher shook his head at the board, at his checkmated king. My Teacher was wearing a fedora and a baggy suit and running shoes. ‘Get cracking,’ he said with a tremulous sincerity as I left the café with my toasted and buttered pumpernickel bagel, having consumed my espresso and blueberry muffin at the counter while I looked at the handsome customers and pretty counter girls.”

Gina listened. Gina puffed on her vaping device. Gina waited for more.

“That is the best advice anyone ever gave me,” I said.

“That’s all? Get cracking?”

“Get cracking.”

No matter the undertaking, applying paint to a canvas or words to a page always feels like a small but arduous thing. Like eating British food. Like Daylight Savings Time, the pointless removing or adding of an hour. Like knowing the names of windows. Gabled. Eyebrow. Segmental. Like gardening. Like waiting at a bus stop, which I did for ten years, after the asylum, riding the lowest form of public transit and reading those DeLillo novels. Shamanic. Paranoid. Mesmerizing. I gardened for less than ten years in total. In Verona, I chose windows and I planted violets. Amethyst. Iceberg. Harlequin.

I’m punctilious about my work and protective of my daughter. Actually, she’s my best work, to say something unforgivably cheesy and American. A light beer thing to say. It would not get me into Austrian heaven. Ze Germans, who love Hasselhoff and Bon Jovi, would let me in.

“Gina,” I asked, feeling something like a revelation, an epiphany. “What I need you to find me is a plum purple polo shirt with on its crest, as its logo, as its insignia…”

“Yes, Charles?” she said, a rare use of my name, an anticipation in it.

“A whale.”

She made an impressed face, just short of a grimace. Appreciation is closer to a frown than a smile.

“Remember that one review you hated for years until you realized it just needed to be taken as a compliment instead of an insult?”

The reviewer was commenting on a septet of canvases titled Concrete Cowboys (Cinereous = Cinereal) South Street 1999. “I remember all my reviews. He said it was clear that my compositions were not made by a European. That man with his face like a hen’s. His wife, an overrated author, more of a graphomaniac, really, ah-trose-cee-ous hair, with her face like an albino ferret’s.”

“He was trying to associate you with an American failing, you said.”

“When the failing was his. He thought I was an abstract expressionist and he thought abstract expressionism ended with Stella’s Black Paintings. Wrong on both counts, buddy. He thought because he once drank drinks with Kline and de Kooning and because he published a regular art column in a respected periodical that he was some sort of low god. I’m glad he’s dead and that it was renal cancer. Drank not just his liver to poisoned but his kidneys to failure, the little shit.”

Gina had retrieved from the kitchen closet Maria’s duster and a can of Pledge. “That’s a big meanie thing to say.”

“Fine,” I said. “Meanie it is then. I’m a crotchety bitch and I don’t have to like everybody. It’s healthy to want your enemies to go to shambles. I do plenty that is altruistic in this world.”

Patient-and-forgiving Gina started dusting my living and working space.

“That reminds me, Words Without Borders thanked you for the donation. They sent a nice postcard-looking little rectangle in a fancy envelope. The sort of thing a person puts on their mantle, should they have a mantle, should they be a wielder of their plentiful altruisms.”

Marijuana elicits a neatness fetish in Gina so I said nothing and watched her attack the books and the moldings with a thing that wasn’t a feather duster but was close enough. Firm keester on her. On her partner Terry as well. I like a firm backside. It’s perhaps rude or even passé, but it’s not sexist. A saggy, dragged-down backside on a man disappoints me just as much.

“‘There’s something vague and soothing yet noir-like in his paintings,’ a Chilean art critic once wrote about me,” I said as Gina paused in her cleaning to find a picture on her phone of the printed postcard-ish thing fit for a showy altruist’s mantle.

She quoted verbatim, showing off that she knew the Chilean’s review cold, like a scholar: “‘In his colors. At the edge of the canvas. The fringe. It’s dark out there. Most painters are dark in the middle. Most lines converge, like a chessboard. His lines do not. His lines move towards the quadrant of corners, like rooks on a chessboard, like the parapets and turrets of an old Hibernian castle.’”

When asked about things like my “creative process” I don’t snicker or stutter. I’m very very thoughtful before I answer.

My best answer wasn’t to the Chilean art critic, it was to a young woman in Las Vegas, on the campus of the big university there. Columbia is the only school I’ve ever refused. I don’t have so much as a Bachelor’s. One semester at SVA, enough to know it wasn’t for me, though I did meet My Teacher there. But the top of the chain in the asylum’s hierarchy of shrinks was a Columbia man. He died of cancer, pancreatic. Went quick, unfortunately.

The emcee in Vegas was a wizened old literature professor who loved Borges and Cortázar. I recorded the Q&A portion with one of those old tape recorders, the mini ones, but it has been published exactly nowhere. Someday it may be listened to, or a transcript read. Ransom Center, Harwood Museum, a nose-ringed or mustachioed young researcher familiar with Hickey’s critiques, with DeLillo’s novels. Fingers crossed.

A younger man’s voice, I had. A well-dressed man in his thirties, I was. Expensive cufflinks, I wore. New shoes, tailored shirt, free suite at Mandalay Bay. Betting the football games in the sports book and smoking a cigar. Artists’ panel a couple days later at Otis in L.A. and not long after that Tokyo and my only Australian sojourn, Brisbane. But in Vegas I answered the young woman from the audience, while the old lit prof, who for years had lived with and drunk with and drugged with Carver, listened with his intense face, that of a very intelligent yet acerbic frog. “It’s not a process, it’s a moment,” I intoned. “This may sound crazy, but to step into the room with your canvas is not the beginning of anything. Nor is the application of primer or gesso or paint. It’s not about the light, even. A few, a very select few, could see it, if they were paying close attention. They could record in hour, minute, and second: the moment. I have never done that. Never waited for someone else’s moment. It would be a big deal. To lurk. To actively try and glimpse it. It would be like witnessing the crowning of the head, your baby’s emergent scalp. If you miss your moment…” I looked to Carver’s friend, the professor who was of Argentinian descent though an American, a man with a gray ponytail, runner-up for a Pulitzer, and then I looked to the woman, a student, and continued, “…the artwork will be a subpar artwork. As a promising child in America often grows up to be a subpar adult. When there is something substantial there, something of quality, there is never, never ever ever, a process.” A pregnant pause and I surveyed the audience, passed out eye contact like it was Halloween candy, like it was warm rolls at a banquet and I the man with the tongs. “There is a moment. That moment will go on for as long as it takes. Imagine whatever artwork you like, but however many hours or minutes or days it took to make that indelible thing you love? Mo-ment. There are only originals and copies. One is made by a moment, the other is made by a process. That is the solution. The way out. The line of flight. A process is a maelstrom. A moment is a safe harbor.” I almost stopped then, but I had to clarify one last thing. “And that is the only time the word ‘safe’ is a good thing for an artist.”

Then I stepped away from the microphone and told the lit prof that the Q&A was over, that the other raised hands would not get to chime in or inquire. I sat down, unscrewed my plastic bottle of lukewarm water, sipped from it, gave a flourishy bow and doffed an imaginary cap, and bathed in the applause of people who endured the heat of Southern Nevada in order to go to school to appreciate art. And mostly fail at it. But you never know, maybe one in a thousand, one in ten-thousand, one in a hundred-thousand, will either have or witness a moment.

During the Covid lockdowns I thought of publishing a transcript of that evening, but it wasn’t for 2020 or 2021, it’s for the future. When I was locked up in 1996 and 1997, the future was all I had, and I kept my art in my head. I refused to draw, to paint, to collage, to “map my inner pain.” During quarantine, I accepted only one offer, a Zoom chat with an artist who teaches at Yale’s photography program, the hefty man who makes enormous photographs that look like movies about poor white people, some of them naked. Whatever his flaws, he’s an artist. He’s had moments. He would be able to at least attempt, in photography, what I meant by White Water Duck in Orange Flamescape Inspired by the Horse in Picasso’s Guernica but the Whole Thing Resembles Most of All a Creamsicle. I wouldn’t mind him taking a crack at it, wouldn’t mind Lynch attempting it on film, or DeLillo appropriating it in a book., I would very much mind Gerhard taking a shot at it on the canvas. Canvases are not films or photographs or novels.

Very very slowly, Bergman’s head rose up from the cushioned curl of his canine bed. He heard, I think, something I could not, something way in the distance. It was the earliest and most amniotic beginnings of a siren, but it did not come our way. He put his head back down onto the fluffy edge of the torus-like bed that ensconced him like a womb.

Each iteration of dachshund movement is not like a snowflake. It may come again. It may be identical to previous dachshund movement. That doesn’t stop Tiphanie and me from watching him like spies in the bushes, from letting him amuse us with his pet-ness. It would be a mighty suffering indeed should I open the door to my shower and see his little dog body lying dead, one limp and unrevivable ear making it clear that he would never again raise his head at perceived siren noise.

Such a tapered and conical and regal shape, the head of a dachshund.

Then Bergman leapt suddenly to his feet and padded over towards the radiator. He jumped up on it like he did when he was a younger dog. “Look at you being frisky!” An adrenaline shot of joy provided by the entity my daughter calls Berman.

“He’s going to knock over the envelopes,” said Gina, seated, done with dusting, referring to a stack of manila ones tied with twine. Tangible things. I hope my daughter will not be an abandoner of tangible things. I wouldn’t mind if she abandons that name her mother labelled her with, but it’s not my way to suggest nicknames or alterations. She must find a new cognomen on her own or not at all.

“As long as we don’t disturb the file cards in their box there. I forget what to call it. The sorted notecards thing. Index? Cards? Storer? Container? Those thick manila envelopes are fine. They’re all individually marked and catalogued, and already scanned.”

“I’ve never seen him jump up there,” Gina noted as she stood to put back the duster and the Pledge. “Maybe he smells something in the envelopes. Photographs sometimes smell like vinegar to me.”

“Perhaps some Twizzlers, while you’re up.” I made my most beseeching face.

“You don’t pay me enough!” she fake-yelled in a convincing “No wire hangers ever!” staccato.“And amned if I know what this card box is called,” said Gina, picking it up to show that she wasn’t going to immediately scurry to the pantry for my Twizzlers. “It’s a handsome little thing. And Bergman is a handsome little doggo.” He posed on the radiator, facing the window, his flanks warmed, his tail bestilled. “Don’t know if we have any of Jefe’s red licorice left. Have to check the cupboards. You wanna come, Bergman?” Bergman did not follow, just looked out the window, perhaps thinking of tennis balls. I decided I’d throw him a few later, before going to bed. I’d rather throw my dog tennis balls than have sex. Yes. Definitely.

Gina did two years of the PhD in art and archaeology at NYU with a focus on museum and curatorial studies. She speaks and reads French fluently. Her brother is an addict; they’re estranged. She hates very much the Sacklers and has read all the books and watched all the movies. She claims she has a hard time setting foot inside The Met these days. She snapped at people who wouldn’t get vaccinated but didn’t unfriend them, and she never liked the masks or thought they did much besides virtue signal. Gina is vain, she likes her face being seen, she applies her makeup very very well, to the extent that she makes of cosmetics an artform. She could have done it professionally, for celebrities, like Aucoin did. She says the right things, the pre-approved and homogenous and sanctioned and artless things, but she’s not a groupthinker, a lockstep liberal, and I’m proud of her when she tells me that despite her aversion to all things Sackler family, she still loves the Temple of Dendur room, in what is no longer called the Sackler Wing of The Met.

After we’d both separately watched the overrated Goldin doc I asked her, “If you could destroy that ancient Egyptian temple, all of it, everything in that room, in order to bring back to life every single person who died of an opioid overdose in the last decade, would you do it, would you destroy the Temple of Dendur?” She replied, with a thoughtful pause so as not to be disrespectful to the recent dead. “Are you fucking kidding me? Hell no.”

- - -

Gwen is storklike and I’m what people refer to as pear-shaped but they almost always, and I assume sexistly, apply that term to women, so I will say I’m more kangaroo-like in build. I can’t see Tiphanie’s post-toddler portliness lasting. She likes to ride her tricycle. She likes to swim. She likes very much to walk to the post office. I think the post office inspires her. That’s one of the few times when she’ll raise her voice to that loud, shrill squeal children use, and far too often their parents don’t correct them, their eyes on their phones instead of on disciplining and raising and actively parenting their spawn. When I see another responsible, invested, caring parent gently remonstrate their child for behaving obnoxiously in public places, I try to catch their eye and congratulate them with my own physiognomy: thumbs ups, OK gestures, nods of encouragement and comradeship. They tend to respond in kind, and I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it brings me joy, but I believe it makes us both think something like, “So shines a good deed in a weary world,” or, “There’s some good in this world, Mister Frodo.”

Despite that thrill of a second or two, that optimism of “At least some of us who have chosen to reproduce fucking get it,” I know that by all rights we should not even be here. In the great stories, darkness and danger prevail, and no one’s ending is happy; the shadow wins, and the dark doesn’t pass, and the new day doesn’t come. I’m holding on to something, and the way I’ve done that my whole life was by making the right kinds of images, the ones that are full of these truths.

Now I swivel to a new vocation. To words. Not to abjure. But to dab on a different palette.

I no longer smoke cigarettes. I no longer write postcards. I once sent a pregnant Gwen a postcard from Brazil, the Canudos region, depicting the town or village or municipality or whatever it’s called in Portuguese. It was stained with tobacco because I was smoking a pipe with some local artists and my translator Ramon when I wrote it. I wonder if maybe, just maybe, Gwen keeps it in the music box that plays “Für Elise.” Ramon would know who composed “Für Elise,” as would those artists. They were old men, though, and Ramon had a good thirty years on me, so it’s quite possible they’re all dead.

One time, I had not yet turned twenty-one, I was in The City as arm candy for Carole, an older friend who’d pitied me for my incarceration and had connections in the art world. She took me as her +1 to a frou-frou function at the American Institute of the Graphic Arts. This was the late ‘90s, when they were stenciling Andre the Giant on the walls and HIV and AIDS were still scary acronyms. Not as scary as the shock treatments I went through two years before that, the ECT, but scary, and for all my faults and selfishnesses I was always very condom conscious. People were queued out front in a line, but I was inside already, with my friend Carole and a guy she’d introduced me to, I don’t remember his name or what his dick looked like, only that later that night he shouted loudly when he came inside me from behind, into the rubber I made him don. Carole watched. That was her thing, watching gay men have sex and masturbating. A sort of French-Algerian manchild is all I recall of him. Wispy beard. Narrow chest. Oh, and he was from Florida; Pensacola or Daytona Beach. The event had something to do with the Basquiat movie having just come out on VHS, a buyable and rentable object, how we watched movies then, and the crowd was burbling with talk of a possible appearance by Bowie. I saw Hopper there, the only biggie from the cast who made it. With that side part in my hair that I’d labored over, I approached him and blubbered some fanboy spiel about how much I loved Blue Velvet and Chattahoochee but some muckety-muck intervened before I could bring up the asylum. Someone had to whisper to me who Reinking was when I commented on her endless legs. Gass I’d heard of but not read; he was telling a story about an award he’d won and how he didn’t attend the ceremony. I had read Ashbery. He was there too. Must have been in his sixties. Signed a cocktail napkin for me, “I’m no Hockney but I too enjoy swimming pools,” above a very legible signature, all in a blue felt tip pen.

Perhaps Tiphanie will look at it some day and be inspired to look up Ashbery and Hockney via whatever kind of brain implants they will have by then.

The young will travel even less than they do now. Travel will be restricted by repressive governments using environmentalism as a cudgel. Christopher Nolan will still be alive, making his movies and being feted, but the young will no longer like or respect him much. They will still watch much more pornography than I did back when I was young and screwing around with men whose names I no longer remember nearly as well as I remember the smell of the pipes in Canudos or the way Ashbery smiled when I told him how much I adored his statement about Agnes’s watercolors being uncontrollably beautiful and distressingly powerful. He said something self-deprecating about his overuse of adverbs, swirled his tumbler of limeless gin on the rocks, and half-whispered as he stumbled away, “On a clear day, on a clear day, on a clear day…”

- - -

Atop the battered oak coffee table in front of the sofa were Gina’s crossed ankles and a miniature bottle of Orangina she’d extracted from the bold red refrigerator, its door covered in Tiphanie’s beloved magnets featuring various breeds of dogs, along with the letters of the alphabet which she delights in shaping into words. I’m glad she’s an only moderately precocious child. She isn’t easily upset or made ecstatic. Except when triggered by the sight of the post office, or sometimes just by blue mailboxes in general, she does not break into frenzies.

Her mother’s body I miss. Gwen’s skinny frame and protuberant breasts ignited ecstasy. It sounds gauche, I’m sure, but there is something penile about her breasts, the way they jut from her torso above her ribs.To my weird sexuality they’re reminiscent of erections. Those I miss sometimes as well, their curvatures, the way erect penises remind me of diving boards. The tepid natterings of men who over-performed their gayness, their membership clarions, that was the thing that held me back from permanently joining their ranks. I don’t have sex these days, with any gender. I don’t watch much porn. I watch it the way I read the New York Times, occasionally and with much disdain, thinking the performers were so much better twenty-five years ago.

Tiphanie says she isn’t a fan of dinosaurs, but she likes to wear this flowery skirt over topsiders with a loud turquoise polo shirt that has as its crest a Gatorade-green brontosaurus stitched into the fabric. The material of a child’s garments makes me tender and sad.

Gina sauntered over with a handful of Twizzlers for me and inserted one into her bottle of Orangina as a straw after biting off each end. A knock on the door meant a third person coming to enter my space, meant Xavier and his bicycle, which was not permitted inside. We argued about it once. He got vexed and I got offended. He: “You think I drive my bike through piles of dogshit?” Me: “You think I live in a building where thieves roam the landings looking for bicycles to steal?” We squashed it, though, so I chose not to make a quip, and he’s a new father so I also refrained from making fun of his scruffy-sweaty bicyclist aesthetic and his horseface. Gina arranges my affairs in the present. Xavier I pay to steward them into the future.

- - -

Xavier held the telescope I’d had him pick out for Tiphanie’s big Christmas gift with on his face a look like: I’m in a room with a crazy person and his assistant, and the assistant is sipping Orangina through a red licorice straw. His intonation was pedantic as he said my daughter wouldn’t fully appreciate it for a few years but Xavier knew of what he spoke—the discovery of the violent origins of gravitational waves, neutron stars and black holes and meteor showers, the fifth force and dark matter and dark energy—a man who would make an effort to translate what he knew to normies who were not obsessed with his obsession.

That’s why I have Gina. To translate art world things into non-art-world-ese. In both their occupations, there is a degree of shame. The agents and editors, the publicists and personal assistants of this world, they are saints, methinks, for absorbing that shame, for swallowing it. To call them failed artists is inaccurate. What they are? Lingerers, hanging around after they’ve been rejected and asking if they can’t just be part of the clique, members of the secret world, cardholders in the cool kids’ club. And we artists (never “creatives,” never) need them, we absolutely require them. We do.

“Five, six different brands of k-cups right next to the Keurig,” I told Xavier. “Help yourself.” Xavier is not a coffee snob. One of the Dunkin’ Donuts original blend k-cups and he’s a happy young papa.

The only Bible in my loft (a KJV in mauve) is on top of the refrigerator in a stack between a neon blue book titled Twelve German Novellas and a black one titled Nine Plays of the Modern Theater, all of them paperbacks.

“So we’re going over images of yours today, Gina and I?” he said. “Paintings that will hopefully never be on calendars and posters, which they will still make in the future despite ours becoming an increasingly more digital world. Is that the vibe, boss?”

“Not a bad approximation,” from Gina.

I decided not to get into an argument about bosshood or gender roles or employee-employer dynamics.

“Paper for calendars. Paper for posters still. Not quite holograms.” Xavier yawned. “Not yet and probably not ever. Same for virtual reality helmets and flying cars. And NFTs, don’t get me started. But what goes on inside black holes? Maybe, probably, eventually, if the nukes don’t blow us all up first.”

“I would like to believe that Tiphanie may live to see aliens.”

“And Oppenheimer is better than Barbie, but both are more entertainment than art,” said Gina to Xavier. “That was part of our vibe before your arrival, me and the artiste here, aging together.”

I posed my craggy face and nearly non-existent jawline, aspiring to but an iota of the regality of my dog’s set of head on neck. Outre Moue, I thought, would also make a good title for something.

“I preferred boyman’s Asteroid City movie to both of them,” Gina continued.

“Alien contact I don’t know, but the fifth force is a major discovery. If we have enough jobs to make it to the next phase once self-driving trucks are a thing, the world will become a better place. I really honestly think it might. No more humans needed for deliveries. No more underpaids pissing in soda bottles to keep their jobs,” said Xavier. “Just AI robots in the Amazon warehouses and the Amazon trucks.”

I sighed a sigh that was older than my middle-aged status and summed it up for him in a word. “Fulfillment.”

In my peripheral vision, I saw Bergman come down off the radiator to lap water from his dish in the kitchen. A cursory tasting. I don’t police his toilet habit or remember to close the lid as much as I ought. I sometimes catch him walking from room to room, snuffling about before making a run for the latrine. I have to side-eye him, let him know I’m watching, and I usually catch him after he’s already passing out of view, just a smear of dog, low to the ground, an animal alone, thirsty.

He doesn’t interact much with the other dogs at the dog park. He occasionally bullies a larger dog just for the hell of it. He occasionally digs a hole and noses around, perhaps hoping to extract a badger. He trots back to me and wags his tail. He never bites, but other than Tiphanie’s he does not tolerate the attentions of children. It’s kind of heartbreaking. They like him more than most of the dogs, but he spurns them, shows them his butt and toddles away, haughty little homecoming king my dachshund.

“The gift shop in museums I can tolerate,” said Gina, “but yes, Xay, you’re right, a calendar or poster is no place for a contemporary artist of repute. Long dead artists, it’s part of the gig. Dorm rooms papered with Café Terrace at Night. Cubicle calendars featuring The Blue Boy.”

Blue Boy is her favorite. She will probably retire to Pasadena at some point, my Gina. Terry will probably not accompany her. Emma will probably not become a musician.

The whirring sound of heating water in the Keurig for Xavier, who indeed chose the Dunkin’. He will stay east coast forever, I’d wager, Boston or Philly as far away as they would stray, Xavier and his Quaker-familied provider husband Henry, and their son, now four months old, named Wyeth.

In the large portfolio case some paperback books had settled to the bottom. Xavier stuck in an arm and rooted one out, an annotated copy of Bleak House, a stubby Signet Classic I first read in the asylum. It was in Connecticut, near where I’d lived as a boy in one of those not-quite-a-town-not-quite-a-citys with a “New” as the first word. I fear that state still.

He leafed through the book. “There is a hush upon Chesney Wold in these altered days,” he read. “’Tis underlined. Such precise handwriting, your annotations, but kind of faded, hard to read. I wish they were in pen instead of pencil.”

They took away the dull pencil each day before lights out. They never let me have a pen.

Xavier hoisted the portfolio case and laid it horizontally on the upholstered settee catty corner from where I sat on the proper three-cushioned couch. The settee cost more, around eighteen-hundred. From Pottery Barn, I ordered it. I liked the color, a dark denimy blue. I still do.

In his mid-twenties, Xavier’s the kind of young man who likes to curry solace. Gay but unaffected, also a Parsons person, photography, studio-intensive. He will become either a distributor or a wedding photog, maybe a docent part-time. Mostly white but just enough Asian, a single tattoo on the back of his left calf, a cascade of bricks, stones, and stained-glass windows, an homage to his minister mother and bricklayer father and a trip they took around France as a family when he was a small boy, before his parents’ split. Nifty square-framed glasses. Dorky-fashionable haircut. Upper east sider. Pretty eyed. Probably a top who wishes he were a bottom. A fellow with a weakness for Jackie Kennedy and Princess Di who, before his sugar daddy (and still now, for all I know), was an indulger in short-lived romances with dreadlocked Caribbean men, big butch ballers who reminded me of Derrick Henry and Marshawn Lynch, Richard Sherman and DeAndre Hopkins.

He started sifting through the portfolio and stacking things in piles. “Wait!” said Gina, and I saw Bergman react to her raised voice from the kitchen, where he was lingering in hopes of a snack. His treats are stored in the pantry, on the floor, three shelves below the Twizzlers. It was a framed shot of me in my early thirties, the gray just starting to creep into my hair. “That’s you at that thing in Amsterdam where they berated you about your sexuality.”

“One persistent young Irishman, a journalist with an agenda. Probably out of the closet for all of about a month, in the most Catholic culture there is, so cut some slack, girlie. I was well within my rights to shut him down, though, as they say in the title of the video online.”

“‘Reporter gets owned for asking about artist’s queerness,’ I think it is,” said Xavier.

“I’m not one to turn slights into weaponized victimhood. There will be no fragility or apologism here. I don’t even diva out anymore. And I was never vicious. I’ve always presumed that it’s an artist’s job to be smarter and more sensitive than their critics. More rigorous. I forgave his attempt at some sort of gotcha question, trying to make me look like a Judas. He was just trying to be fierce.”

Xavier sipped his coffee with his legs crossed, his pants the perfect level of tightness but with garish sneakers. He may already own a fanny pack, I reckon. He stopped swiping on TikTok and looked at me. “You were escaping the tyranny of explanation.”

I love how defensive my ordinates (no need for them to be sub) get on my behalf. They would do anything to make sure I never come off like some fatuous cartoon, some bumpkin, some lemming lefty or quisling centrist, some alt-righter or Republican. I am (shhh, don’t tell anyone) an independent, a conscientious objector. I agree with the majority of Americans that both Biden and Trump are unfit for the presidency. If I believed in voting, I would go third-party. Obvs, as the kids say.

I may or may not be queer, but I’m no trad or Chad.

- - -

“This feels too important for li’l’ ol’ me,” said Xavier, who thinks he owes me self-deprecation. He sorted the accordion folders and manila envelopes that were colonizing a large part of the non-studio segment of my loft. “It would mean a lot to people to see this all, this library of your books, not to mention the unexhibited work, the sketches, your alternate versions and early attempts. If you’re ever willing to show them.”

His sentence should’ve concluded with “while you’re alive.” I turned to Gina, next to me on the couch, looking down harshly at Bergman who wanted to jump up and lay on her lap, but he could not win the staring contest and deferred. He crept around Xavier and got his front paws up on the couch before I calmed his head with a stroke. “Not on the couch while Gina’s here, my little provocateur. Can’t have her sneezing all over the place. You are not a misbehaving ocelot.”

“The insurance for this collection is taken care of too,” said Gina. “Once we do the next show, in a year, year and a half, Pace or Wildenstein probably, we may even have a deal for the memoir by then, we can attach some of these pieces to the exhibit. Gagosian lets Gerhard do it with his sketches. People will cream over the handmade address books with the phone numbers; the studies, the newish works on graph paper, the pointillist-but-not-really pre-paintings. It’s all archive-worthy, Jefe. Getting it collated and labelled is just a matter of being prepared and professional.”

Bergman uttered a single bark, as if in concurrence with the professionalism of the woman who could not pet him.

“Find the right university,” said Xavier.

“Or the Berggruen people,” was Gina’s retort. “Don’t be provincial, over-committed to American campuses. We want a presence in multiple countries at this point in Charles’s throughline, Xay.”

“Don’t fight, kids, I’m not worth it,” I deadpanned.

There are two original one-sheets hanging in my loft. The 1976 King Kong I prefer even though it’s worth only a few hundred, whereas the 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968, the one with the starbaby, is supposedly valued around six or seven thousand. Tiphanie also prefers the King Kong.

I don’t own much art-art. An Ellsworth, an Indiana. Both smaller pieces. Gifts of the artist. One on either side of my bed in the back corner of the loft behind the kitchen space and the bookcases.

- - -

From my old apartment on Worth Street, I would walk down West Broadway for a burger and fries at Taylor’s Diner. My lunch every Wednesday. My one Coke a week. My “getting fit” years, first for Carl—an emotionally volatile S.O.B.—people today would call him “abusive,” so no more words for him, and then for Gwen, who I met there. I was sketching in my pad. Something out of character for me—the Woolworth Building.

“Wow, that’s amazing,” she said, peering over with an unvarnished stare.

I told her it was the tallest building in the world back in the 1920s. She told me she had a long layover. I said, “How’s about a burger. Some fries. A Coke.”

She made the puzzled face of a woman who gets hit on a lot and doesn’t expect it to ever work but for whatever reason, from this New Yorker who looked rather gay, it was charming her.

We were in a booth, not a table. One of the happiest days of my life.

Maybe Tiphanie isn’t such a bad name after all. Maybe it was destined, me and Gwen. Gwen giving me Tiphanie. Or me giving Tiphanie to Gwen.

Tiphanie has a face like a domesticized lion cub. She will study abroad, I hope, in Germany or England. Or both.

Gina doesn’t know about the notebook with the sketch of the Woolworth Building. I need to annotate that. And in my memoir I can tell the story of Gwen in her polyester uniform, how she picked up her burger with one hand and took a big unashamed bite.

When I first read Agnes’s Writings I wasn’t sure whether they were transcendent or horrid. Did her words qualify as a treatise, as a manifesto, as spiritual, thus dismissible? The genius was in the details. The moment unfolding needed attention paid to it. I realized that her book was an emblem of her worldview.

My artistry was immature then. I opened Agnes’s book in that apartment on Worth Street, my own worldview still inchoate. I read about how the plains outside of Tulsa inspired her love of the horizontal line, and how that line was first like the sea, and then like singing. Our art is not about structure. Our art is not avant-garde.

- - -

Long ago we lived in caves and painted on walls. Now I live across the river from an island that in the dystopias is often underwater. I think it’s more likely to be frozen over. A fitter fate I could not imagine for the Sotheby’s-and-Christie’s set. They’re already in rigor mortis.

The Hudson I can see if I get up close to the window and peer down to the right, through some leaves, over past the Saint Peter’s buildings, the college. The river will be part of the tundra. Istanbul will still be thriving and moist, an enclave. Post-sapien people-machine hybrids will be puttering around on the moon or a series of space stations orbiting Mars. Mars will be sponsored by Merrill Lynch, or ExxonMobil, or McKessen.

My Writings will not be lighthearted, nor will they foretell doom. Whatever else I am, I am no sort of monger. I am not sus. I venerate stillness and insignificance.

A loft full of stuff to bestow to future art lovers, practitioners of silence, collective solitude, and being alone, fully human humans who seek the gift of aloneness, the antidote to loneliness. As long as we have objects in the world, we have art. As long as there are still, somewhere, beaches and oceans, we have perfection.

Xavier wants to visit Vienna. I hope he gets to. He has a love for Mozart, Haydn, Mahler, and Strauss. Schubert he says is more my speed, that he’s Agnesy, but Franz is a bit too moribund. I enjoy Ludwig’s “Waldstein Sonata” and Keith’s 1975 Köln Concert. I like music that makes me think “But what if...?”

Every now and then a child sees through the scrim of flippancy to the truth. Maybe when Tiphanie is older she will sit in rooms of brilliant artworks, inspired to draw or sketch, to scribble prose or verse or her own memoir. Maybe she will contrive a book from which people learn nothing but are smarter for having read it. Not just smarter but elevated. My canvases—I have been told they “burned down” their viewers, their appreciators. Tiphanie’s book, written under a nom de plume—may it Phoenix them sumbitches.

I hope, more than anything, that my daughter will be true to herself. And may she impose herself on nature instead of vice-versa. I took what was in my mind and strived to make of it beauty. Unlike me, though, she is still in the pull of life, and so I must put her to work.

“I will need a desk,” I announced. “For Tiphanie to grow into. Thoughts?”

Xavier reached back and pulled his right heel to his thigh, to relieve some stress or burden or discomfort in the hamstring. Gina stood, her whole form ignited.

“Where will we put it?” She looked around, a person on the hunt, a non-robot given a goal, not a function. “A girl needs her privacy.”

“And a view,” said Xavier. “A window is more important than her own room. She has that at her mom’s. Looking down at the world from behind glass in her dad’s artist’s loft in a city, there’s something magic in that. Inspiring.” He thought of not saying something corny but said it anyway. “We all need inspiration.”

He did not have to worry about being mocked. About the subject of inspiration, I am serious and unironic. “Or we die,” I said, making my voice just a bit more performative, stentorian, masculine.

“Without inspiration we become worse than dead,” said Gina.

I remained seated.

“We become aimless,” she continued, picking the box of notecards off the radiator and clicking the lid closed as Bergman scrambled over to her. “Are you aimless, little dog getting under my feet?” He looked up at her and wagged his tail, faster than usual, more whap and torque, which meant he wanted to go for a walk.

“He needs to take a constitutional,” I said. “To hold back the eventide of doggie depression a smidge. To help take the edge off. To pee or poo in the fresh air, my aristocrat dachshund.”

“They don’t live long,” said Xavier, a tired new father blurting something without thinking.

They are not my children but I will miss them, Gina and Xavier. The more you ask of your children, the more you have them actually do, the more they are able to do on their own.

As a young man, a quarter century ago, when I finally got let out, all I wanted was to be useful, to create, to contribute to a family not my own, to divest myself of the one that had imprisoned me. Eager to be useful then, proud to have contributed now.

Agnes said: Never have children, do not live a middle-class life, and do nothing that takes away from the work.

I can’t say I have heeded her, but in the final section of her book she states that it is not the artist’s role to worry about life, to feel responsible for creating a better world, and that to do so is a serious distraction. I have lived my life by that principle. I have obeyed her dictate that there is no help anywhere but in inspiration, that personal emotions and sentimentality are anti-art, that an artist must fully surrender.

And I will. Soon. First I must finish my book.

***