Going Dutch

It’s a Willy Wonka world out there. Dis-ease is sweeping the country. Not just the mutating variants of CoVid, but the malaise of racial discontent. Liberals and conservatives stoke the fires of cultural animosity. The left tries to bridge the interests of educated college kids and the urban underclass. This is the case, even though your average inner-city dweller, especially if they have criminal experiences, will rip off a bubbly idealistic undergraduate for their undergarments if given the chance. 

The right has chosen a crass billionaire as a political savior—a mouthpiece that alienates anyone who can’t empathize with white supremacy. Civility is at an all-time low since the 60s. It’s hard to find a city where people aren’t stuck in asshole driver mode. Everyone is down a delusional rabbit hole. Everyone has a single-minded interpretation of what the malaise boils down to: patriarchy, unbridgeable racial differences, the worship of money, the ailing environment, the decline of religion, the LGBTQ agenda, the triumph of Marxist idealism or Nietzschean cynicism in the ivory towers of academia.

My dad is as insensitive as ever. He thinks it’s my fault I was raped. “You got drunk, Justine,” he says in his Cuban-accented English. “You were out to have fun. You think horny boys aren’t out for a good time when they go to college bars?” He still calls me by my former name, even though I changed it a year ago. I’m tired of telling him my name is Justin. He’s not happy I also changed my family name after he divorced mom. “From Chavez to Chase?” he asked after I had gone to court with my petition and spitefully shown him the notice that I was required to put in the paper. “Being Hispanic isn’t good enough for you? You want to have an Anglo name?” 

I have no aspirations to be a Victorian lady. I’m Hamlet furious at a man, perhaps at all men, for what happened to me. Specifically, I feel ire toward a college football player who spiked my drink with Molly, took me into the men’s bathroom at a pub and probed the terminal end of my intestinal tract with the Lucifer serpent between his legs. I’m gonna die, I thought as it was happening. It was glorious. It was god-awful. I’d had adverse experiences as a kid (as all children do), but no memorable trauma. The rape was my first childhood trauma, since I didn’t consider myself fully an adult yet when it happened. I was twenty years old. 

I never even knew the guy’s name, and ever since then I started wanting to become a guy. Ironic, right? But there’s also something wrong with it, something profoundly sick in the head about the fact that I would want to become a man after undergoing one of the worst forms of victimization a man can dish out. Understandably I have a lot to talk about in therapy.

My dad doesn’t understand me and despises my art. His disdain for my paintings makes me doubt myself, and ruminating about it fuels the depressive downswings of my bipolarity. Painting doesn’t come easy for me. Especially since I started to paint non-representationally—without using live models, setting up still lives, or trying the occasional landscape. It’s difficult for me to translate my thoughts and feelings into abstract or expressionistic color and form, but I want to be the next Hilma af Klint with a little Jean Michel Basquiat mixed in for good measure. 

I’ve read that at a certain point in her life af Klint desired to have a penis. This isn’t the only reason I aspire to be like her. My ambitions are lofty. I also want to have a temple dedicated to my paintings like she did. But I don’t want to go unrecognized in my lifetime, like af Klint did. This is where Basquiat comes in. I want to be a living artist celebrity. I want to make millions selling my hallucinations of jagged lines and livid color. I wouldn’t mind dying at the age of twenty-seven if it meant I would die famous. That gives me six years to produce a body of work to rival af Klint’s or Basquiat’s. That’s plenty of time if I paint ten hours daily for the next twenty-two thousand or so days.   

My latest work is a rectangular assemblage of four smaller canvases predominantly in hues of blue and orange, with highlights of neon yellow. Part of the originality of my work is that I take smaller canvases I’ve painted, canvases that may be of questionable quality and couldn’t stand before a gallery jury alone, but when conjoined into a larger piece, they work, their visual impact equaling that of a larger, single painting.

I take this canvas assemblage to a framer’s shop not far from where I live with my doting mother. “I have a painting I’d like framed,” I say to the man inside the store, “should I bring it in?” The painting sits in the front seat of my 2001 Toyota Camry as if it were a girlfriend, waiting for me to bring her into a surprise birthday party she already knows about and therefore isn’t such a big surprise.

“Well, we can’t find the right frame for it if it’s not in the store so I can use our imaging technology to visualize what the framed masterpiece will look like,” says the man. I’m 5’4” and he stands nearly a foot taller than me. He has blondish hair, and at the moment I can’t remember what color his eyes are. I want to say green, but they also could be hazel or even brown. You’d figure someone like me who considers themselves an artist would remember chromatic details like that, but I’m nothing if not distracted most of the time, either by my depressions that stew me in negative thoughts or manic episodes that bask me in the sunlight of uncompromising positivity.   

After he explains the details of pricing, I say “I hope this is worth it. I can barely afford the materials to paint these things. Getting them framed for purposes of making them more saleable is going to put me in further in debt to my mom. It's not like I don't already owe her my right thumb.”

After he helps me choose four sections of framing to place at the corners of the painting, he comes back to the work desk where he uses a computer to create an image of the fully framed painting. “What’s it called?” he asks.

“Perseverance,” I say. “The goldfish in the bowl on the canvas in the upper left-hand corner represents me and how sheltered I am, the metaphorical bubble I live in. I live under the watchful eye of my mother, the woman on the canvas in the upper-right hand corner. The two fish in the lower right-hand corner represent my mother’s sign, Pisces—she’s very sympathetic and goes to great lengths to ensure my happiness.” 

I don’t tell the frame shop employee that I rarely express my appreciation for Mother Marbles’ emotional sensitivity and awareness in words—I don’t remember when I last told her I loved her, but I’m able to depict my feelings for her in drawings and color. I am her prized, solitary goldfish in a bowl. 

The last canvas in the quartet is a hand holding a spatula. My mom makes the best grilled cheese sandwiches imaginable, and she prepares me one without fail when I’m in a funk. Although Mother finds it difficult to express her thoughts and feelings for me into words, the canvas in the bottom left corner is an homage to my mom’s ability to feed her way into my heart.

“I get the impression your painting tells a heartfelt story. You should really sign it,” the frame shop employee says and offers me a collection of pens, brushes and inks with which to do the honors. I ask for a scrap sheet of paper to practice signing and when I’m done, he glances at the initials I use to personalize my work. “JC? As in Jesus Christ?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. 

“If only I could be so compassionate and determined to save humanity,” I say. 

“Interesting,” he replies, “my theory is that the original JC was a provocative artist, definitely a poet, possibly a visual artist who made the blind see, and most likely a singer who made the deaf hear. If he was a performer, I believe he was able to cathartically heal people with his performances. The closest we’ve had in the modern age is the 60s psychedelic rockstar Morris James, but you look a little too young to recognize the name.”

“He was the singer for The Way Out, right? I had a friend in college who listened to James religiously. Funny you should make the messianic comparison.” 

The frame shop employee proceeds to use his phone to show me a collection of the artistic work he has done. He seems to be particularly proud of a series of paintings he has made by applying paint directly onto the bodies of men who then make full body contact with a canvas and thereby leave a multi-hued impression that is simultaneously figurative and abstract on the fabric.

By the time we’ve found the right frame for my painting, a thin rustic matte black one that complements the roughness of the painted images, we’ve opened up to each other about facts of our lives that only people that have known each other for months would know. He tells me of the drugs he has taken to inspire the creative process, of the argumentative brothers who own the frame shop. He tells me about his biracial teenage twin daughters and the wife he divorced four years ago.

I open up to him about my diagnosis, about my mother’s and my codependence, about my insensitive father, and my name change. Before he receives payment for the framing services, I tell him about the uncertainty I feel about my artistic ability and the desire I have to form a country-punk band. 

“Country-punk, huh?”

“Yeah, a mash up of old school country like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard with the political sensibility and cadences of the Clash. The band would be called Pussycat Janks, my musical pseudonym.”

“A 10% discount says you won’t sing me a verse from one of your songs.”

I’ve only recently started practicing original material, but fourteen dollars will pay for lunch at the taco place in the strip mall not far from the neighborhood where I live.

With a face that’s turning strawberry red, a fluttering heart, and the best country twang I can muster, I sing:

My heart wouldn’t listen

When I knew you were kissin’

Another boy.

Why’d you have to go and

Extinguish my joy,

Deliberately kissin’

Another boy?

Now the bottom of the bottle’s dry.

And nothing can pay for the

Tears you made me cry.

The carefully measured clapping of the frame shop employee breaks the silence that follows my a cappella performance, “You just earned a discount, and if that performance is any indication of the rest of your repertoire, you’ve just made me a fan of Pussycat Janks.”

I feel relieved, flattered, and like I’ve made a soul connection with someone who until forty-five minutes ago I didn’t know existed.

He gives me the change for the two hundred-dollar bills I hand him, and before I turn toward the exit, he asks, “Justin, can I take you out to lunch?”

I want to say, Sorry, Mr. frame shop employee, boys aren’t my thing anymore, can’t you tell? But before I can say anything, he says, “And don’t worry, my intentions are purely platonic. It’s not every day someone has the opportunity to share a midday meal with a latent country-punk star.”

I hesitate, but think of what Mother Marbles is always telling me: “Justin, you need to get out more. You don’t have any friends. Artists need to associate with other artists. You have to take some chances if you expect to feel better about yourself and the world.”

It kind of scares me, but I tell the man who just heard my song, “Okay, we can go to lunch. I know the perfect taco place, but I only accept if we go Dutch.”

He takes one of the frame shop’s business cards, jots down his name, Jack, and his number, and says, “We have a deal, Justin. Dutch it is.”