Me Talk Pretty One Day (5 page)

It is difficult for me to sit still for more than twenty minutes at a stretch, so I used to interrupt my tanning sessions
with walks to the pier. On one of those walks, I came across my father standing not far from a group of fishermen who were
untangling knots in a net the size of a circus tent. A lifetime of work beneath the coastal sun had left them with what my
sisters and I referred to as the Samsonite Syndrome, meaning that their enviable color was negated by a hard, leathery texture
reminiscent of the suitcase my mother stored all our baby pictures in. The men drank from quart bottles of Mountain Dew as
they paused from their work to regard my father, who stood at the water’s edge, staring at the shoreline with a stick in his
hand.

I tried to creep by unnoticed, but he stopped me, claiming that I was just the fellow he’d been looking for. “Do you have
any idea how many grains of sand there are in the world?” he asked. It was a question that had never occurred to me. Unlike
guessing the number of pickled eggs in a jar or the amount of human brains it might take to equal the weight of a portable
television set, this equation was bound to involve the hateful word googolplex, a term I’d heard him use once or twice before.
It was an idea of a number and was, therefore, of no use whatsoever.

I’d heard once in school that if a single bird were to transport all the sand, grain by grain, from the eastern seaboard to
the west coast of Africa, it would take… I didn’t catch the number of years, preferring to concentrate on the single bird
chosen to perform this thankless task. It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory
of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work. Birds search for grubs and build their nests, but their leisure
time is theirs to spend as they see fit. I pictured this bird looking down from the branches to say, “You want me to do what?”
before flying off, laughing at the foolish story he now had to tell his friends. How many grains of sand are there in the
world? A lot. Case closed.

My father took his stick and began writing an equation in the sand. Like all the rest of them, this one was busy with x’s
and y’s resting on top of one another on dash-shaped bunks. Letters were multiplied by symbols, crowded into parentheses,
and set upon by dwarfish numbers drawn at odd angles. The equation grew from six to twelve feet long before assuming a second
line, at which point the fishermen took an interest. I watched them turn from their net, and admired the way they could smoke
entire cigarettes without ever taking them from their mouths — a skill my mother had mastered and one that continues to elude
me. It involves a symbiotic relationship with the wind: you have to know exactly how and when to turn your head in order to
keep the smoke out of your eyes.

One of the men asked my father if he was a tax accountant, and he answered, “No, an engineer.” These were poor men, who could
no longer afford to live by the ocean, who had long ago sold their one-story homes for the valuable sand beneath them. Their
houses had been torn down to make room for high-priced hotels and the A-frame cottages that now rented in season for a thousand
dollars a week.

“Let me ask a little something,” one of the men said, spitting his spent cigarette butt into the surf. “If I got paid twelve
thousand dollars in 1962 for a half-acre beachfront lot, how much would that be worth per grain of sand by today’s standard?”

“That, my friend, is a very interesting question,” my father said.

He moved several yards down the beach and began a new equation, captivating his audience with a lengthy explanation of each
new and complex symbol. “When you say
pie
,” one man asked, “do you mean a real live pie, or one of those pie shapes they put on the news sometimes to show how much
of your money goes to taxes?”

My father answered their questions in detail, and they listened intently — this group of men with nets, blowing their smoke
into the wind. Stooped and toothless, they hung upon his every word while I stood in the lazy surf, thinking of the upcoming
pageant and wondering if the light reflecting off the water might tan the underside of my nose and chin.

One
: At an early age my sister Gretchen exhibited a remarkable talent for drawing and painting. Her watercolors of speckled mushrooms
and bonneted girls were hung with pride in the family room, and her skill was encouraged with private lessons and summer visits
to sketching camp. Born with what my mother defined as an “artistic temperament,” Gretchen floated from blossom to blossom
in a blissful haze. Staring dreamily up at the sky, she tripped over logs and stepped out in front of speeding bicycles. When
the casts were placed on her arms and legs, she personalized them with Magic Marker daisies and fluffy clouds. Physically
she’d been stitched up more times than the original flag, but mentally nothing seemed to touch her. You could tell Gretchen
anything in strict confidence, knowing that five minutes later she would recall nothing but the play of shadows on your face.
It was like having a foreign-exchange student living in our house. Nothing we did or said made any sense to her, as she seemed
to follow the rules and customs of some exotic, faraway nation where the citizens drilled the ground for oil paint and picked
pastels from the branches of stunted trees. Without copying anyone else, she had invented her own curious personality, which
I envied even more than her artistic ability.

When Gretchen’s talent was recognized by teachers, both my parents stepped forward to claim responsibility. As a child my
mother had shown a tendency for drawing and mud sculpture and could still amuse us with her speedy re-creations of a popular
cartoon woodpecker. Proving his to be a latent gift, my father bought himself a box of acrylic paints and set up his easel
in front of the basement TV, turning out exact copies of Renoir cafés and Spanish monks brooding beneath their hooded robes.
He painted New York streetscapes and stagecoaches riding into fiery sunsets — and then, once he’d filled the basement walls
with his efforts, he stopped painting as mysteriously as he’d begun. It seemed to me that if my father could be an artist,
anyone could. Snatching up his palette and brushes, I retreated to my bedroom, where, at the age of fourteen, I began my long
and disgraceful blue period.

Two
: When painting proved too difficult, I turned to tracing comic-book characters onto onionskin typing paper, telling myself
that I would have come up with Mr. Natural on my own had I been born a few years earlier. The main thing was to stay focused
and provide myself with realistic goals. Unlike my father, who blindly churned out one canvas after another, I had real ideas
about the artistic life. Seated at my desk, my beret as tight as an acorn’s cap, I projected myself into the world represented
in the art books I’d borrowed from the public library. Leafing past the paintings, I would admire the photographs of the artists
seated in their garrets, dressed in tattered smocks and frowning in the direction of their beefy nude models. To spend your
days in the company of naked men — that was the life for me. “Turn a bit to the left, Jean-Claude. I long to capture the playful
quality of your buttocks.”

I envisioned the finicky curators coming to my door and begging me to hold another show at the Louvre or the Metropolitan.
After a lunch of white wine and tongue-size cutlets, we would retire to the gentlemen’s lounge and talk about money. I could
clearly see the results of my labor: the long satin scarves and magazine covers were very real to me. What I couldn’t begin
to imagine was the artwork itself. The only crimp in my plan was that I seemed to have no talent whatsoever. This was made
clear when I signed up for art classes in high school. Asked to render a bowl of grapes, I would turn in what resembled a
pile of stones hovering above a whitewall tire. My sister’s paintings were prominently displayed on the walls of the classroom,
and the teacher invoked her name whenever discussing perspective or color. She was included in all the city- and countywide
shows and never mentioned the blue ribbons scotch-taped to her entries. Had she been a braggart, it would have been much easier
to hate her. As it was, I had to wrestle daily with both my inadequacy and my uncontrollable jealousy. I didn’t want to kill
her, but hoped someone else might do the job for me.

Three
: Away from home and the inevitable comparisons with Gretchen, I enrolled as an art major at a college known mainly for its
animal-husbandry program. The night before my first life-drawing class, I lay awake worrying that I might get physically excited
by the nude models. Here would be this person, hopefully a strapping animal-husbandry major, displaying his tanned and muscled
body before an audience of students who, with the exception of me, would see him as nothing but an armature of skin and bones.
Would the teacher take note of my bulging eyes or comment on the thin strand of saliva hanging like fishing wire from the
corner of my mouth? Could I skip the difficult hands and feet and just concentrate on the parts that interested me, or would
I be forced to sketch the entire figure?

My fears were genuine but misplaced. Yes, the model was beefy and masculine, but she was also a woman. Staring too hard was
never an issue, as I was too busy trying to copy my neighbor’s drawings. The teacher made his rounds from easel to easel,
and I monitored his progress with growing panic. Maybe he didn’t know my sister, but there were still plenty of other talented
students to compare me with.

Frustrated with drawing, I switched to the printmaking department, where I overturned great buckets of ink. After trying my
hand at sculpture, I attempted pottery. During class critiques the teacher would lift my latest project from the table and
I’d watch her arm muscles strain and tighten against the weight. With their thick, clumsy bases, my mugs weighed in at close
to five pounds each. The color was muddy and the lips rough and uninviting. I gave my mother a matching set for Christmas,
and she accepted them as graciously as possible, announcing that they would make the perfect pet bowls. The mugs were set
on the kitchen floor and remained there until the cat chipped a tooth and went on a hunger strike.

Four
: I transferred to another college and started the whole humiliating process all over again. After switching from lithography
to clay modeling, I stopped attending classes altogether, preferring to concentrate on what my roommate and I referred to
as the “Bong Studies Program.” A new set of owlish glasses made pinpoints of my red-rimmed eyes, and I fell in with a crowd
of lazy filmmakers who talked big but wound up spending their production allowances on gummy bricks of hash. In their company
I attended grainy black-and-white movies in which ponderous, turtlenecked men slogged the stony beaches, cursing the gulls
for their ability to fly. The camera would cut to a field of ragged crows and then to a freckle-faced woman who sat in a sunbeam
examining her knuckles. It was all I could do to stay awake until the movie ended and I could file out of the theater behind
the melancholy ticketholders, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the pale worrywarts I’d seen flickering up on the screen.
True art was based upon despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible.
Maybe I couldn’t paint or sculpt, but I could work a mood better than anyone I knew. Unfortunately, the school had no accredited
sulking program and I dropped out, more despondent than ever.

Five
: My sister Gretchen was leaving for the Rhode Island School of Design just as I was settling back into Raleigh. After a few
months in my parents’ basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine
and conceptual art. Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire
civilizations. The moment I took my first burning snootful, I understood that this was the drug for me. Speed eliminates all
doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit? These are questions for
insecure potheads. A speed enthusiast knows that everything he says or does is brilliant. The upswing is that, having eliminated
the need for both eating and sleeping, you have a full twenty-four hours a day to spread your charm and talent.

“For God’s sake,” my father would say, “it’s two o’clock in the morning. What are you calling for?”

I was calling because the rest of my friends had taken to unplugging their phones after ten
P.M.
These were people I’d known in high school, and it disappointed me to see how little we now had in common. They were still
talking about pen-and-ink portraits and couldn’t understand my desire to drag a heavy cash register through the forest. I
hadn’t actually done it, but it sounded like a good idea to me. These people were all stuck in the past, setting up their
booths at the art fair and thinking themselves successful because they’d sold a silk screen of a footprint in the sand. It
was sad in a way. Here they were, struggling to make art, while without the least bit of effort, I was living art. My socks
balled up on the hardwood floor made a greater statement than any of their hokey claptrap with the carefully matted frames
and big curly signatures in the lower left-hand corners. Didn’t they read any of the magazines? The new breed of artist wanted
nothing to do with my sister’s idea of beauty. Here were people who made a living pitching tents or lying in a fetal position
before our national monuments. One fellow had made a name for himself by allowing a friend to shoot him in the shoulder. This
was the art world I’d been dreaming of, where God-given talent was considered an unfair advantage and a cold-blooded stare
merited more praise than the ability to render human flesh. Everything around me was art, from the stains in my bathtub to
the razor blade and short length of drinking straw I used to cut and ingest my speed. I was back in the world with a clear
head and a keen vision of just how talented I really was.