The Forgery of Venus (6 page)

T
here was a fairly short deadline on the project, and by the time I got back to the loft I was thinking about painting and trying not to think about where in the bottomless money pit I was going to stuff that twelve and a half grand. Since I turned whore I have all the art books, and it’s kind of cool to look through them and summon up the originals I’ve seen. The funny thing is I know that when I actually have the palette set up and brush in hand I won’t give a shit what the finished product is, I’ll be stoned off the process of painting.

Lotte, in her art gallery head, used to calculate that I made about eight bucks an hour with the kind of work I put into a project, and I could never explain to her why I do it, why I have to work like that in order to get out of bed every morning, because I knew what she would say. She would say, why don’t you paint then for yourself, Chaz, and give up this
connerie
? Then I’d get mad and say, how the fuck are we going to pay for Milo’s goddamn pills, five grand a month at least, and are you going to pull that out of your little gallery? And then she’d say, but I can sell your work, your work is wonderful, people would love to have your work. And there it would sit, like a fresh turd on the table, the thing that busted us up, Chaz Wilmot’s principled refusal to paint real work for the commodity market. So I would storm out to the studio and work on a magazine cover or a record album and smoke dope until everything seemed just peachy.

I was just sitting down with a book of Ingres portraits when the phone rang and it was a secretary asking me if I would hold for Dr. Zubkoff, and my belly dropped because I thought it was one of Milo’s docs with more bad news. So when he came on and I figured out who it was and found out what he wanted, I was so relieved that I would have agreed to practically anything.

T
he next day I took the subway up to the Columbia medical school campus and walked to the building I’d been told to find, a four-story brick-and-glass structure on St. Nicholas Avenue at 168th Street. Inside, the usual medical smell, the over-cooled reception room with the tattered magazines, the white-coated receptionist behind her little window. They were expecting me. I filled out a medical form, lied about my drug use and my smoking like everyone else, and was turned over to a nurse in pale blue scrubs who took me into a little room and told me to get into a gown. They said they wanted to make sure I was totally disease-free before they let me into a major drug study, so if I had a prior condition I couldn’t come back at them with an accusation that their drug messed me up.

A couple of hours later, I found I was healthy, despite my lifestyle, still sound as a bell, apparently, just like Krapp. It was an impressive medical workup, bloods, scans, the whole nine yards, and after it I had an even greater sympathy for my poor kid.

After all the tests were done and I was dressed again, they led me to a small conference room with the other guinea pigs and I saw Shelly himself, now a far cry from the pale slug he was in college, a man with a tan and longer hair, with the flossy rich-guy cut they all have and that aura of authority they must bolt on when they give out the med school diplomas. A dozen or so people in the room, all arty types, about evenly divided between the sexes, mostly younger than me. It looked like Sunday brunch at any hip place in Williamsburg.

Dr. Z took us through a PowerPoint show about salvinorin A, the drug we were about to pollute our bodies with. On the screen a picture of some dusty Indians sitting around in a circle, Mazotecs from the deserts of Oaxaca, who used a plant called
Salvia divinorum,
the diviner’s sage; their shamans used it to break loose from time and see the future and the past. Silly them, because according to Shelly it was all happening in the damp meat of their brains, like everything else we perceived. Over the last few decades, researchers had extracted the active principle of the Indian herb—salvinorin—and discovered that it was not an alkaloid like most of the psychoactive drugs, but a much smaller molecule, a diterpene, and unique in that respect. It was a kappa opioid agonist, I recall that, something to do with the control of perception. The drug had a variety of different effects, we learned, and these varied considerably between users. Of particular interest, though, was its ability to create the illusion that you were reliving a portion of your earlier life. Dr. Z said he thought that since the retention of childlike wonder and freshness of perception was widely considered to be a central element in the creative process, maybe salvinorin might enhance it, which was why he’d selected his subjects from artists and musicians. Then there was some technical stuff about how if they got psychological effects they would use tracers and so forth to try to pinpoint the areas of the brain that did creative stuff, and then he closed with assurances that while the drug was extremely potent, it appeared to be quite safe and nonaddictive.

Then the usual questions from the floor, which Shelly handled, I thought, with a smoothness that had not been apparent in him as an undergrad, and the meeting broke up. I went up to him afterward and we shook and did the whole small world thing, and he invited me for a private chat in his office. Which was very nice, golf clubs in the corner, all kinds of awards, blond wood desk and chairs, flat-screen monitor, framed kids’ drawings on the walls and a small amateur oil
of flowers in a vase, maybe by the wife, a happy family man it seems, good for Shelly. No talk about old times; he boasted and I listened. His great career, his beautiful family, his house in Short Hills. He said he saw my stuff in the magazines all the time, he thought it was great. He thought I was a success, just like him.

He said he particularly wanted me in this study because it was really going to penetrate to the roots of creativity and even lead to ways of augmenting it. I thought that if he wanted to do that he better bring his lunch, but I didn’t say anything; why rain on the guy’s parade? I was happy for him, the poor schmuck, and it was a hundred bucks a session to me.

After that he turned me over to Ms. Blue Scrubs and I had my first dose of salvinorin. They’ve discovered that the best way to ingest it is via the oral mucosa. They can heat the drug and shoot you the fumes, or they can give you a surgical sponge soaked with a solution of the drug and you have to keep that in your mouth for ten minutes. The first way brings on an intense reaction in a few seconds but it fades in half an hour. The sponge works best; the reaction lasts for a full hour, more or less, and then drops off over the next hour. It’s a way to provide a controlled dose but still imitate chewing the leaves, which is what the Indians down in Mexico do.

She took me to a little room, like an examination room, with a low-slung recliner and left me with an observer in a white coat, nameplate
HARRIS,
young woman, all business, notebook, tape recorder, and a comfortable chair to sit in, like psychotherapy. I made a joke to that effect, minimal response. Message: this is serious research. She opened a plastic tub marked with a numbered label and extracted a damp surgical sponge with plastic tongs. She stuck it in my mouth and told me to chew on it for ten minutes starting
now
—clicked her watch—try not to swallow, and then she dimmed the lights.

I chewed on the cloth and kept the liquid it yielded in a cheek pocket, like a country-boy pitcher on the mound. Faintly herbal, a little like turkey stuffing, not unpleasant. After ten minutes I was allowed to expel the wad. Then nothing for a while. I thought about the
Vanity Fair
project, about money, the usual sad, self-pitying thoughts about how essentially and irreparably screwed up my life was, floating mind-crap. After a while I felt a certain relaxation, like I was looking at Chaz thinking this shit and finding it amusing; I guess I actually laughed a little then. Next a feeling of vague physical discomfort, like my muscles were starting to cramp, that claustro coach-class airliner feeling, and I got up and went for the door.

Harris said I couldn’t leave, so I sat down, got up, sat down, paced back and forth, energy flowing through my body, electric, vibrational and crunching over gravel and dead leaves, the air chill and damp and I’m just drifting, not really sad, but somehow feeling a déjà vu as we’re walking toward the grave site at the head of a column of mourners, quite a few of them, more than I had expected really, my sister in her nun’s head-scarf, they’d dumped the black clothes by then, holding on to my arm. I stopped and stumbled a little from the force of the disorientation and she asked me what was wrong. I told her and said I’d never had a déjà vu that strong, and she said no wonder, it’s not every day you bury your father, and we walked along and the rest of the funeral played out.

Charlie and I got a little drunk later and she told me she was thinking about leaving the religious life. She liked helping the starving millions in the world’s nasty places, but the good they could do seemed so paltry compared to the extent of the evil. Yes, it was good to give twenty girls a year a convent education and keep them from being raped by older guys, but there were hundreds and hundreds they couldn’t help, the mothers would bring them to the school in Kitgum, crowds of women and girls begging for admission, knowing
it was hopeless, but what else could they do? And somehow now that our father was gone a lot of the reason for it (as she now admitted) was gone too, and she felt she wanted to move into the world, not to leave religion exactly, but to be of some greater service. We talked about that for a while, what different orders of sisters did, and she asked me how my painting was going and did I think I would start painting for myself now and not just to piss the old man off, and I laughed at that.

We stayed up late talking, just like we’d done in the old days when we were kids, and she kissed me good night and then I went up to my old room. It hadn’t changed at all, the Indian blanket on the bed, my old hockey stick on the wall next to the painting of my mother, and that damp wicker smell from the old furniture. I got out of my clothes and was going to go to bed but remembered I hadn’t closed the French doors leading to the terrace and if the wind shifted in the night the rain would ruin the carpets, so I put my old blue plaid robe on and tried to open the door. The door wouldn’t open, and I rattled the knob and pounded and kicked at it, and there was a hand on my shoulder, which scared the shit out of me because I was alone in the room, and I turned around and this woman was there in a white coat with
HARRIS
on the tag and I was back in the drug study.

Now, you absolutely have to understand that this was
not
a reverie or a dream, nothing like that at all. I was
there
. I was back in time twenty-two years, inhabiting my younger body, talking to my sister in the living room of my father’s house, full color, stereo sound, the works. I said, holy shit! And my knees gave way and I had to lie down on the couch, and Harris was all over me about what had happened. It was hard to reply at first. It wasn’t that I felt drugged, or dull, or extra sharp like on coke or speed, but more detached, a very subtle variation in consciousness, and there was a beating in my head, a pulse like a kitten licking my brain four or five times a second,
thnick thnick thnick,
in just that delicate way.

A
t the same time I felt both extremely focused and detached, as if experiencing my life for the first time without the blurring of worry and regret. Not in the least like hash and the furthest thing from acid. She asked me a bunch of questions she read off a printed sheet, and I answered them as best I could, yes, I attended my father’s funeral; no, I can’t guarantee that what I experienced was a memory and not a fantasy. It seemed perfectly real, just like talking right then to the silly woman seemed real, although if you informed me that I was still in my room on the night of the funeral and that this interview was a fantasy I would have said sure, right.

She kept me for another hour. The kitten licking faded after a while and I returned more or less to normal, although at that point I was no longer sure what normal was. On the way out I lifted from the reception room table a tattered old
People
magazine with a story about Madonna in it. Back at the loft, I set up a small gessoed wood panel and dug through the chests until I found an old theatrical costume that would do, plum colored, with gilt threads and a straight, high bodice—some Juliet must have worn it in the Edwardian age, stank of mothballs, but in good shape. I hung it on my manikin, propped her in an armchair, arranged the lighting, pinned Madonna’s face up on the wall nearby, and got to work.

I drew it out in charcoal, a figure from the waist up with her arms demurely folded, pale hair in ringlets falling to the neck, showing against a cloudy background and a little city with walls and towers back there. Underpainting in warm gray-ochre, mixed a little Japan dryer in because I’m a commercial artist, can’t wait for the paint to dry, and who cares if it cracks and blackens in fifty years? So when the
imprimatura
was touch-dry, I built up the masses, laid on glazes, and then the fall of the drapery, and it went terrific, I painted for hours,
it got dark outside, I got hungry, I ignored the phone ringing. Was it different? I guess. I can often get lost in the act of painting and forget for a while that what I’m doing is essentially commercial crap, but this session was even more so, I was totally into it, with my body, just letting the paint flow out onto the fresh white surface, magic.

My stomach was growling by then and I wanted to give the underpaint a chance to dry, so I took a break and walked over to Chinatown for some noodles and took the
People
with me to read and study Madonna some more. Her face in the cheap printing showed the mere mask of the celebrity, and the job was to find the interior behind it, and of course you can’t do that from a photo, that’s the point, the handlers want to control the star’s image, revelation not wanted, so I knew I’d have to imagine it. And naturally I thought about Suzanne, a singer at a vastly lower level of celebrity but a face I knew well, and I worked with that. The
People
photo was a typical lowering Madonna shot, the overbit mouth pouting and a little downturned, the eyelids at half mast in a way meant to be read as sexual according to the conventions of beauty shots.

When I got back to my place I opened her mouth into a little gape of astonishment and put into her eyes the deep loneliness and insecurity of the famous performer. And the not-so-famous, as I knew from experience.

And the bambino. They hadn’t asked for one but I thought it added the right touch. So I pulled out an old baby picture of Milo and painted it in freehand. Milo had a kind of sly expression, you know the kind, the secret and unknowable joy of the pre-articulate child.

I glazed the underpainting all night, and when I looked at it by daylight it was certainly a credible Leonardo, no sharp outlines, everything smoky—
sfumato
, they called it—and the background is pretty good. I threw in some of those flat-looking quattrocento trees, which I always thought were an artistic convention until I went to
Italy and saw they had taken them from life—I never learned what kind of trees they were, I always call them quattrocento trees. Amazing really; I would have futzed around with something like this for weeks, and so if Shelly thought the drug enhances creativity, I have to say yeah, it does.

A
nd it got better. I did five paintings in five days, by far the most productive period of my life, I mean without coke and speed. And it was nothing like the frenzy I used to have when I was drugged out, it was just like…shit, I can’t say what it’s like. Being supernormal, maybe, not getting distracted, total focus, total pleasure in the work. When I was four or around there I could sit forever in my father’s studio while he worked, with big sheets of newsprint on the floor, drawing with my crayons or painting with watercolors. Time stopped, or flowed at a different pace, and there was nothing but the moment before I made a mark; and the making the mark; and looking at the mark afterward. And again. That week was just like that; for some reason all the shit that usually runs through my brain—worries about money, about the wives and kids, about what I’m doing—all seemed to take a little vacation, leaving a stripped-down Chaz who just painted. Wonderful!