Chapter 8. Abscess & Abuse (Pt. 1)

Adrienne sat on the stool in the studio after lying in bed for an hour. Taking to the easel with renewed energy, the blank canvas held no fear for her as she swathed it in blues, blacks and greens… framed by zigs of yellows… and zags of red energy. It was another self-portrait but not exactly angry… more like an agitated distance with a hint of pathos. The conflict was gone, and she was no longer suffering. Yes, a junkie doesn’t suffer addiction. Up to a certain point addiction is the solution to suffering for the likes of Adrienne. When heroin leaves the body, it exits the same path that it entered… but it leaves with a vengeance. Every cell, muscle and nerve-ending cries out as the hunger makes itself known. Everything has a price and the price for a junkie is the suffering of withdrawals and not the relief acquired by one fix.

The sad fact for her was that she needed to paint, and heroin helped her to do that.

Always thinking while she immersed herself in the ritual... Why do I need to paint? It certainly isn’t for the fame or fortune of selling any of these paintings. I have a dealer in Paris, but that fucker didn’t think I was doing anything progressive or avant-garde enough by painting… or, by painting at all unless it was sellable. Painting on a canvas with oils was more of a fetish to me than a devotion to art: a fetish for retrieving something of the past, perhaps. After all, I’ve heard them all expound from the lecterns of the academy, cafes, and bars, that painting became obsolete with the first Daguerreotype. It was just as obsolete when Braque and Picasso blasted everyone’s perceptions before the Dadaists and surrealists took art out of the studio and onto the public stage. That made even the idea of ART seem somewhat silly and arcane. Painting in its death throws, Jackson Pollack came along and splattered his canvasses with action paintings, it made the act of painting a self-obsessed hobby for the moronically elite. It would be better if all the painters left their studios and got a job in a factory rather than to toil away, trying to find relevant meaning with oil on canvas. Andy Warhol didn’t mistakenly call his loft, The Factory. He made it clear that the highest purpose of art in the latter half of the twentieth century was to make money. He made himself even clearer if ever it was posited, “My five-year-old can do as well as that!” His answer to such claims wasn't rebutted by his trademark affirmation and spaced-out tone, “Oh, that’s interesting.” That was all he would have had to say but that was enough to imply, “I hope your five-year-old can make the kind of money I make with it.”

And, art schools! Psshhhaw! Art schools... to me, and Max too, are dayschools where semi-affluent parents put their girls and boys to finally make up their minds before they launch out into the world for a real career, or to marry a lawyer. These places create in the innocent minds of each student the delusion that there is a place to put their scribbles. The big secret is that the “Art World” only opens the window of opportunity to a few selected artists each decade and then slams it shut. These artists are touted as the winners of the lottery and are encouraged to believe that what they do matters somehow. Artists who stumble or get diverted… loose interest… or see through the guise… are pushed aside for one percent at the top of the next crop of eager prospects out of New York, Berlin, London, Paris, or Los Angeles. Throw in a second and third tier of hopefuls out of San Francisco, Tokyo or Seattle.

Why then should've anyone imagined that painting was any more important to me than keeping a personal diary? Either desires, intuitions, experiences, are universal and have an appeal to other people; or, it is all a vain pursuit and the painter was just spending time between birth and death, pretending to be more important than all that.

She wrote in her journal, “Between birth and death… between one fix or another… I no longer wonder what it is that I am doing here. It is a dreamscape I occupy for a spell… a spell cast by an illusionist… the master illusionist… you call it God? Max calls it the Great Whazoo. How many theologians can we count dancing on the head of a pin? But in the dreamscape, something else is going on. Angels or Demons, I can’t tell which”

The doorbell chime broke the reverie. She descended the stairs, pulled her robe over the purity of her nakedness…. aka Duchamp… and closed it with a strap. A police officer stood close, nose nearly touching the door, trying to peek through the grilled wicket.

She must have left the gate open. When she didn’t close the gate, people could get all the way to the door and that especially annoyed her while she was working. She opened the door.

The officer stepped back into Nick, who was staring at his own feet, too occupied to pay attention.

“Eh hem, I’m Officer Dan Richards. Are you Mrs. Nicholas Baker?”

She never knew what to think whenever the police showed up with Nick at the door,“Yes, no, er… I am… that is, at least until the divorce is final. What did he do now?”

“He’s okay. I simply need to know if you will let him in your house,” Officer Richards spoke somewhat sneeringly.

“I don’t like the looks of this… what is going on?”

The officer was more congenial, “he told me to take him here.”

“Why not?” She didn’t know what was up and didn’t want to get pissy with these shitheads. Nick’s dad had some sort of pull with the SBPD and DA’s office. She wasn’t sure what; but, whenever Nick got stopped for drunk driving, he never went to jail for more than a few hours; nor did he ever get booked for possession. She was disgusted by his sense of entitlement… his smooth talk, “What do you want me to do?”

“Okay, I just needed to check with you.”

He went back down and fetched Nick out of the squad car. Nick could walk on his own, but he was in a Zomboid trance. She had him escorted into the music room to the couch. He sat without saying a word.

“Here’s the keys to his car. I had to park it down the street,” Officer Richards leered, adding, “You're okay to drive, right?”

Adrienne didn’t think she looked fucked-up, but she knew she was. The question annoyed her and the prospect of putting up with Nick in the house was more than she could take. She snapped back, “You should know. Do I look okay to you? You are the police, aren’t you?”

“I’m sorry. I’ll be on my way.” 

He went back to the squad car and waited until she got in Nick’s car before he left. She was fearless and not afraid of being nailed for a DUI. She was high alright, but she wasn’t drinking. She wondered whether that cop had been able to see her pupils through her prescription transition lens. Even though Richards made her nervous the way he was eying her up, she put on a tease walking down to the car in her lightly transparent kimono style robe. It didn’t make any difference to her any longer.

She drove around the block and parked it at the back of the property in the car-port. While parking it, she rammed the garage wall, cracking a stanchion. Making note of it, she said, “I’ll fuckin’ get someone to fix it later.”

She made her way down to the house with Sushi and Tofu joining her in tow.

Entering the music room, she approached Nick who was srawled out on the couch, “So, what the hell, Nick, are you planning on staying here today?”

“Uhhh, mmph-mutter-mumph. Dad died.”

She leaned over and shouted directly into his ear, “I can’t understand you!”

“Uh, I’m not deaf, d'you haff any coffee?” he slurred, “I says, Dad died.”

“Sure. You’re kidding?”

“How about coke?” he spoke more clearly.

“A Coke?” she wanted to needle him but when she realized what he'd just said, she softened her tone, "What happened to him?”

“Lung cancer... I didn’t know.”

“You want sympathy?”

“Coke….,” his head slumped, chin to his chest, “C’mon, girl, Coke.”

“You can say that clearly enough now. Damn it, Nick!”

She went into the kitchen and came back out to the music room with a tall glass of coke on ice and a cup of coffee on a tray, and served him like a geisha in a kimono might.

“Thanks… Not that coke! Can I use your phone?” he bent down to the tray, brushed the glass aside and sipped from the cup without lifting it.

“You’re a pig at the trough now… eh?”

He looked up at her with big cow eyes, “You got Billy’s number?”

“Billy? You know Billy too?”

“I introduced you,” he paused a minute and asked, “Didn’t I?”

“No, Rod introduced me to Billy."

He grasped at her butt.

She flinched away from his hand, "Aarrggggh! It fucking hurts!”

“Who do you think introduced Rod to Billy?”

“Small world?” She didn’t know that Rod had any contact with Nick before they’d... “I think it’s an abscess.”

His way of evening the score was to bait her, “I told Rod that you would soon be available and I’m the one that told him he could go ahead. I hoped he’d fuck the shit out of you.”

Adrienne felt dirty with Nick in the house. She shuddered to think that she once loved the man that had become a shadow of his former self. She knew how to be stern with him, “I’m sorry about your father but you have to go, Nick. I can’t live in the umbra of doom you bring in my door.”

He slurred, “Wha' the fuck… I dent bring an umber-ella? It ain’t even raining.”

His clowning only provoked more anger.

She wanted so badly to lash-out but changed her angry feeling to nothing more than indifference. She rushed upstairs, changed into street clothes, and put his car keys in her pocket. It was painful to draw the Levis over the increasingly sore spot on her hip that had been festering. She came back down to the foyer; he was standing in front of the door, blocking the exit. He towered over her, out-weighing her by at least a hundred pounds, but he wasn’t going to intimidate her: not that day anyway. “Get out of my way, Nick.”

“No.”

She took off a sneaker, it was only a canvas deck-shoe; She whacked him across the face… once… he didn’t move… twice…. he flinched… the third time, he came at her. She backed off.

He challenged, “What're you going to do?”

Adrienne realized how stupid it was to attack him with a Jimmy Chao. He was so doped up she could have hit him with a hammer and he wouldn’t have felt it. He wrapped his arms around her in a straight-jacket embrace.

“Adrienne, call Billy. I need to talk to him.”

“Talk?”

“Yes, I’m broke, I need to see if he’ll give me credit, or, maybe you, muh b’loved, can you do that for me?” He tried to put a wet kiss on her mouth, “You know, fer old time’s sake?”

She managed to wriggle free of his grip, “No… I won’t do it. You’re already into me for more than twenty grand, you bâtard.”  Bastard… that was one name she knew would light him up. In that moment she realized, and regretted, what she’d said.