The Drowned Life (16 page)

You've got to see the way he does it. It's pretty remarkable for a man his age. He does it with a cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth and a look in his eye like there's nothing finer in all creation than doing it that way. There's a certain grace to his movements, a certain cosmic aplomb in his manner. Occasionally he'll grunt, and some observers claim to have heard him call for his mother when he's almost finished. His eyes get really wide, his lip curls back, and you can see the sweat form on his brow. He probably uses more muscle groups while doing it than he would if he were swimming the butterfly. On special occasions he will do it by candlelight with soft music playing in the background, but it's more expensive to see him do it that way.

There was a time when he didn't charge for the sight of it, but that was before when he was still perfecting his method. Back then, when he'd do it, he'd get red in the face and would often wet himself with the exertion, but he seemed to do it more out of obsession than any sense of advancing his craftsmanship. A fellow
by the name of Roger Brown, one of his former neighbors from that earlier time, has said, “When he would do it in those days, he wasn't nearly as refined, but, my God, the energy with which he did it. You'd think he was going to go right through the back wall of the house.”

There are many theories as to how he came up with it. Of course, as with anything this remarkable, there is plenty of sensationalist speculation. One such item of foolishness is that it had been taught to him by extraterrestrials who'd contacted him by way of an AM radio channel, and another is that when he does it, he is possessed by the Holy Ghost. The most bizarre conjecture has to be that it had been a common practice among the populace of the lost civilization of Atlantis and that he dreamed the ancient technique through his collective unconscious. In a 1989 interview, he himself attested, “I just got down on the floor one day and started doing it. As I was doing it, I asked myself the question, ‘How can I do it better?'”

Others have tried it, both male and female, attempting to copy his methods. Two prominent examples are Nettie Stuart and Branch Berkley. Stuart got farther along with the process than Berkley, but in the end they both killed themselves attempting it. Berkley inadvertently set himself on fire, and Nettie Stuart broke a rib, which in turn impaled her heart. Their families got together and started a fund, the proceeds of which would be used to try to bribe people away from trying it. Few took the money; of the rest, the ones who did not perish in their bid for glory you can see today, hobbling down the street or talking to themselves outside convenience stores. We tend to treat these failures with equal parts of tenderest pity and sharpest derision.

He swore he would never fully disclose his secrets, but back in the seventies, before his fame became manifest, he did release an audio tape in which he described each step of the act while he
was doing it. Although he narrates as if you are there in the room watching him and, therefore, is never quite specific enough for the listener to visualize what exactly he is doing, it is said that from his voice alone a certain mystical energy can be garnered by the listener. The following is an excerpt from a crucial part of that recording:

Once, when he was asked by the press what his wife thought of it, he quickly replied, “Oh, she loves it. The kids love it too,” but by then everyone knew that his wife had left him because of it. To this day, she is still bitter over the memory of it and told me, “He'd do it right there in the living room with the kids running around him. Call me old-fashioned, but how many times was I supposed to be witness to that? The day he did it in front of my parents, I gathered up the kids and went home with them. In the months that followed, he would call me late at night and tell me he was going to do it to me. I didn't see how that was possible, but still I went out and bought a gun.”

It wasn't until the early eighties that he came to the conclusion that his abilities were a proverbial gold mine. He started doing it in public after he lost his regular job as a night watchman at a chemical factory. One lonely morning when his refrigerator held nothing
but half a beer and a head of cabbage, he went down to the corner of Eighth and Dupin and just started doing it, right there on the sidewalk. In no time a crowd had gathered, and within minutes bystanders were tossing handfuls of change, one-and even five-dollar bills. One old gentleman threw Burger King coupons.

It was only six months after the historic Eighth and Dupin performance that he got his first gig in a cocktail lounge. He was the scourge of many a torch singer and hypnotist. Who could top him? And he always demanded to go on first. He would take half the door money and a quarter of the liquor profits of a given night. His public loved to drink while they watched him, and he requested that they drink Pink Ladies. This alone was the reason for that drink's great surge in popularity in the mid-eighties. The T-shirts he sold at his shows, bearing a photograph of him in the midst of his passion, were the creamy color of Pink Ladies.

An anecdote that is often recounted about these nightclub years concerns his preoccupation with handsome women. One of the acts that he worked with at the Republic, a seedy place down on the waterfront, was billed as “Prince Mishby and His Virgin Bride.” Mishby, a lanky young man wearing a high-collared shirt and a bow tie, with arms as thin as pipe cleaners and a high reedy voice, tap danced while his beautiful wife sang arias. The couple would then break into a patter wherein Mishby would speak to his bride in lascivious double entendres and this would send the crowd of sailors and waterfront toughs into paroxysms of laughter. On their third night of sharing the same bill, Mishby caught our subject besmirching the Virgin Bride in her dressing room.

What followed was, to some, unpardonable. To others it was as inevitable as big fish eating little fish. Not only did he have his way with Mishby's wife, but afterward, when the tap dancer lunged at him with a pen knife, he did it so brutally to the lanky young man that from that day forward Mishby had to get about on a board
with wheels. “He did it to me without remorse,” Mishby now attests, “and no one came to my rescue. In fact, they cheered him on as I screamed in agony. I guess when you can do it the way he does it, no rules apply.”

He continued to work for a few years at places like the Republic, Sweet Regrets, A Slice of Green Moon, which was, in those days, located between Front and Chase in the diamond district. Then, one night after his act, he was approached by a heavy, well-dressed man sporting a cane.

“When I see you do it, I am humbled,” said the man.

“Naturally,” he said.

“My name is Arthur Silven, and I would like to represent you. Here's my card. I believe the scope of your talent deserves a more fitting venue.”

“You're a fat pig” was his response.

“But I'm a pig with a bite,” said Silven.

They shook hands, and for the next five years he did it under the auspices of Silven Entertainment.

He did it in sold-out concert halls and stadiums so large that people in the back rows and top bleachers looked on with binoculars. He did it before royalty and heads of state, and dignitaries of foreign powers courted his friendship. The money poured in, and he and Silven became wealthy beyond measure. By the end of five years, though, he had done it so much, so well, and for so long, that he felt he might like to
not
do it for a while. Silven would hear none of it and threatened a breach of contract suit. So, one foggy night, he broke into the agent's house and did it to Silven so completely they had to clean up what was left of the agent with a shovel.

Of course, he had a rock-solid alibi of having been at a magic show all that evening. There were numerous people at the event who swore they saw him there, and it was recounted that the magician, an acquaintance of his from the old days at the Republic, even
called him up onstage at one point, had him get into a box with a sliding curtain, and made him disappear for a solid half hour.

He never served any time for the death of Silven, although the D.A. did fleetingly consider prosecution on circumstantial evidence. As it turned out, the case was determined to be too weak. When the photographs of Silven's mangled form hit the tabloids and television, though, the general public was not convinced of his innocence and was put off by the viciousness the attack displayed. As one elderly woman described her reaction to the incident and attendant photos, “It gave me a feeling like when I see a piece of meat at a barbecue that has cooked too long and the flies are risking their lives to get to it, kids have dropped marshmallows onto the hot coals, and there's grease burning too.” The international press started referring to him as “The Savage American.” The noted ethical philosopher, Trenton Du Block, came out against him, as did Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

He walked away from it all and built himself a mansion in the swamps of Louisiana. There, amid the forbidding black waters and moss-strewn cypresses, he shrouded himself from the world. It is said that he raised llamas and peacocks behind the high walls of his estate. The only person from the outside world who still had access to him was his valet, Ruben Charles. Charles has claimed that even he very rarely got to see his employer during these years. “I usually took my orders from a voice that issued from a darkened room,” he's said.

“At night,” Charles wrote in his memoirs, “I would hear him rummaging around the mansion. Then I would hear him in the backyard, doing it to one of the peacocks. The screams were ungodly, and I would cower beneath my covers. When I slept it was always with one eye open. Make no mistake, the day finally came when he did it to me. It was in the trophy room. He charged out from behind a stuffed bear and did it to me like there was no tomorrow.”

Charles could not honestly say whether his boss had been doing it on a daily basis during their years in the swamp. All the valet could testify to was that the day after a bad storm, when the brick wall was knocked down in one spot by a falling tree and dozens of alligators had invaded the sanctuary, slaughtering and devouring all of the livestock, his employer did it on the veranda, overlooking the carnage, with magnificent precision and beauty.

In September of that year, he let Charles go and sold the mansion to the alleged head of a drug cartel. After this, he disappeared for a time. Scattered sightings of him were sporadically reported over a period of the next few years. Individuals told of encounters with him in far-flung locations around the globe. It's since been discovered that certain tribes in the interior of New Guinea carve figures that seem to bear a perfect likeness to him in the act of doing it.

Some believe that he lived a mundane existence with a woman in an apartment in a small town on the Canadian border. Supposedly he'd gone back to working as a night watchman. Judith Nelson, the woman with whom he'd purportedly been living publicly, denies ever having met him, but her family and friends say that she had, for this time period, often been seen in the presence of a strange man who fits his description. One of Nelson's subsequent lovers claims that her body still bore the marks of it having been done to her repeatedly.

When he definitively surfaced again on a street corner in the small town of Fortescue in southern New Jersey, he looked much older. His thinning hair was long and he wore it in a ponytail. A gray beard and the crow's-feet around his eyes made him appear far less fierce than he had in his youth. It was noted that he'd switched to a filtered cigarette. Still, his body was in near-perfect condition, and one could tell from watching him do it that he'd been practicing all along.

The small-town audiences he performs for these days, traveling in his van from street corner to street corner, say that to see him do it now is no longer the sublime terror, the agonizing beauty, it once was. The effect, as I have experienced it myself, has become one of precision and clarity, an exquisite longing for a paradise lost, an empathetic magnet for petty paranoia.

When I went to interview him for the first time on Money Island at the southernmost tip of Jersey, I told him how closely I'd followed his career and that I was thinking about writing a magazine article based on his life. He told me I was in luck, because at his first show that evening on the library field, he was going to do it to the town's mayor. “I thought you didn't do it like that anymore,” I said to him. He looked into my eyes and waved his hand in disgust. “Hey, do it to yourself,” he said and walked away.

That evening in the summer heat, beneath a huge oak tree on the library field, the people of Money Island gathered to watch him do it to the mayor. He did it so gently, and with such care, a young man in front of me broke into tears. The mayor gasped with delight as if before her eyes she was witnessing a passing parade of priceless treasures, and when he was done with her, she seemed to glow. The mayor declared a town holiday in honor of his art and later, on the high school football field, I watched in awe as he did it again, this time alone, beneath a sky ablaze with fireworks.

When I was in graduate school, during the mid-eighties, I'd meet Esme pretty much every Sunday morning for breakfast at the Palace A down on Hepson Street. The runny eggs, the fried corn muffins, the coffee, and our meandering conversations carried all of the ritual of a Sunday mass minus the otherwise grim undertones. There was a calm languor to these late-morning meals and something that had to do with the feeling of home.

We'd gone to the same high school, grown up in the same town, and vaguely knew each other back then—friends of friends—but we'd moved in distinctly different social orbits; hers somewhat closer to the sun. Six years had passed since we'd graduated—I hadn't had a single thought about her—and then one day, late in the summer, just before my first semester at the university was about to start, I'd left my flop loft in the seedy First Ward and ventured out for some groceries. I was walking down Klepp Street, and I noticed this good-looking girl about my age walking toward me, talking to herself. She was tall and thin, with a lot of black
curly hair, and dressed in an orange T-shirt, jeans, and cheap, plastic beach sandals on her feet. She was smoking a cigarette and mildly gesticulating with her free hand. The fact that she was talking to herself made me think she might be crazy enough to talk to me, so I frantically ran through a few icebreaker lines in my head, searching for one to snag her interest. I immediately got confused, though, because the T-shirt she was wearing bore the name of my high school along with the distinctive rendering of a goofy-looking lion. As we drew closer, I saw her face more clearly and knew that I knew her from somewhere. All I could muster when the moment came was “Hi.” She stopped, looked up to take me in, and said, without the least shock of recognition, “Hey, Pat, how are you?” like I'd seen her the day before. Then I realized who she was and said, “Esme, what are you doing here?”

She invited me to come along with her to the Palace A to get a cup of coffee. I'd been pretty lonely since arriving in town, what with classes not having started yet and knowing no one. I couldn't have ordered up a better scenario than running into her. We spent an hour at the diner, catching up, filling in the blanks of all the years and miles we'd traveled. She'd been at the university a semester already, but whereas I was there for a master's degree, she'd already gotten one in mathematics at a different school, producing a thesis on fractals and chaos theory, and now was going for a second one in art. Coincidentally, art was my major also, and I admitted, with a whisper and a tinge of embarrassment in my voice, that I was a painter. This admission on my part deanimated her for a moment. She cocked her head to the side and stared at me, took a drag of her cigarette, pursed her lips, and then eventually nodded as if she could almost believe it. Paint, of course, wasn't her thing—all of her work was done on the computer, plotting points and manifesting the rules and accidents of the universe in shape and color. This stuff was new back then and I had no way to
conceive of what she was talking about, but the casually brilliant way in which she discussed Mandelbrot sets and strange attractors interested me almost as much as her hair and her smile. When I told her I liked the paintings of Redon and Guston, she laughed out loud, and although I knew she was disparaging my chosen influences, I was enchanted by the sound of it, like a ten-year-old's giggle.

We parted that first day after making plans to meet for breakfast on Sunday. Even then, although I knew we might become good friends, I suspected things would never go further than that. As fascinating as she was, she had a distinct aloofness about her even when she was staring me straight in the eye and relating the details of her mother's recent death. It was as if a scrupulously calculated percentage of her interest was held constantly in abeyance, busy working the solution to some equation. In addition, I had, at the time, an irrational, Luddite inclination that there was something morally bankrupt about making art with a computer.

The semester began, and I soon discovered that abstract painting was still the order of the day at the university. Most of the professors had come of age in their own work during the late fifties and sixties and were still channeling the depleted spirit of Jackson Pollock; second-and third-rate abstract expressionists tutoring young painters in the importance of ignoring the figure. The canvases were vast, the paint applied liberally, and the bigger the mess the more praise the piece garnered. From the start, I was somewhat of an outcast among the students with my crudely rendered cartoon figures frozen in drab scenes that bespoke a kind of world weariness; a mask to hide the fact that I felt too much about everything. I was barely tolerated as a kind of retarded mascot whose work had a certain throwback charm to it. Esme, for her part, was on similar footing. No one understood, save the people in the computer science division, how she made her glorious paisley whirls, infinite in
their complexity, or what they represented. The art crowd feared this technological know-how.

I'd done all of my excessive drinking, drug taking, and skirt chasing as an undergraduate, and now I threw myself into the work with a commitment that was something new for me. When I think back to that place I had on Clinton Street, I remember the pervasive reek of turpentine, the beat-up mattress someone had put by the curb that became my bed, the dangerous mechanical heater with its twisting Looney Tunes funnel going up through the ceiling that portioned out warmth by whim, and the bullet hole in the front window I'd covered with duct tape. I worked late into the nights when the neighborhood crystal meth dealer met his clients under the lamppost across the street in front of the furniture warehouse and after the other tenants of my building had turned off the flames under their relentlessly simmering cabbage pots and fallen from minimum wage exhaustion into their beds. Then I'd make some coffee, put Blossom Dearie low on the old tape machine, and start mixing oils. Each brushstroke carried a charge of excitement. The professors who dismissed my work still had valuable secrets to impart about color and craft and materials, and I brought all of these lessons to bear on my canvases.

The months rolled on and in the midst of my education, I also gleaned a few insights into Esme. Outside of our booth at the Palace A, where the conversation orbited pretty strictly around a nucleus of topics—her diatribes promoting an electronic medium and mine concerning the inadequacies of abstraction; a few catty comments about our fellow students' work; the lameness of the professors—she proved to be something of a sphinx. With the exception of her telling me about her mother's bout with cancer that first day, she never mentioned her private life or her family. Anything I learned on that score came through sheer happenstance.

After class one day, I was talking to this guy, Farno, another
painter in the graduate program, in the hallway outside a studio and Esme walked by. I interrupted my conversation and said hi to her, and she said, “I'll see you Sunday.” When I turned back to the guy, he was shaking his head, and when she was well out of earshot, he said, “You know her?”

“Yeah, we went to high school together.”

“So you must have fucked her,” he said.

I took a step back, surprised at his comment, and said, “What are you talking about? We're just friends.”

“I don't think she has any friends,” he said.

My sudden anger made me silent.

“Listen, don't get upset,” he said. “I'm just trying to warn you. It happened to me just like all the others. She'll come on to you. You go to dinner or a movie, things wind up back at her place. I mean, she's charming as hell, brilliant. You think to yourself, ‘Wow, she's great.' You can't help but fall for her. Eventually, it's off to the bedroom. She's aggressive, like she's trying to fuck the life out of you, like she wants to eat your soul. Then, either the next morning or occasionally even late at night, you'll wake up and she'll be crying and then yell at you like a kid pitching a tantrum to get the hell out. I've talked to some of the others about her, both guys and girls, even some of the professors. She's whacked.”

“Well, we're friends,” I said in her defense and walked away.

Later that week, on Sunday, when we went to breakfast, that guy's story was circling in my head like a twister, but I kept my mouth shut about it. Since I'd never gone down that road with Esme, instead of thinking her crazy because of what I'd been told, I just felt, whether I should have or not, kind of bad for her. While all this was going through my head, she was giving me some rap about how chaos theory showed that the universe was both ordered and chaotic at the same time. I could barely concentrate on what she was saying, my mind filled with images of her fucking
different people in the art department like some insatiable demon. Finally, she ended her explanation, making a face rife with dissatisfaction for the indecisive nature of creation, and asked me to pass the sugar.

In the next couple of weeks, the indecisive universe dropped two more revelations about her into my lap. I was in the university library one night, looking for a book of Reginald Marsh's Coney Island paintings, when I found myself upstairs near the study carrels. My department didn't think enough of me to grant me one of these. Department heads doled them out—like popes might grant indulgences—to their favorite students. I knew Esme had one, though, courtesy of the computer science people, and I knew she used it from time to time. I walked along the narrow corridor, peering in the little windows on the doors. Most of them were dark and empty. Eventually I found hers and she was in there, sitting at the desk.

In front of her was a computer with a screen full of numbers. To her right, on the desk, was an open book, and, with her right hand, she was intermittently flipping through the pages and working the computer mouse, her attention shifting rapidly back and forth from the page to the screen. At the same time, on the left-hand side of the desk was a notebook in which she was scribbling with a pencil to beat the band, not even glancing at what she was writing down. While all this was going on, she was also wearing earphones that were plugged into a boom box sitting on the floor. When she turned her attention to the book, I caught a glimpse of her eyes. The only way I can describe her look, and this isn't a word I'd normally think to use, is
avaricious
. I was going to knock, but to tell you the truth, in that moment I found her a little frightening.

The second piece of the puzzle that was Esme came to me from, of all people, my mother. I'd called home and was chatting with her about how my studies were going and what was up with the
rest of the family. True to her mother-self, she asked me if I'd made any friends. I said I had, and then remembering that Esme had come from our town, I mentioned her. When I said her name, my mother went uncharacteristically silent.

“What?” I asked.

“Her family…sheesh.”

“Do you remember them?”

“Oh, yeah, I remember her mother from the PTA meetings and such. A block of ice. You didn't want to get near her for fear of frostbite. And the father, who was much more pleasant, he was some kind of pill addict. At least they had a lot of money.”

“She's okay,” I said.

“Well, you know best,” she said, obviously implying that I didn't.

Esme's
condition,
or whatever you want to call it, haunted me. I don't know why I cared so much. To me she was just a breakfast date once a week—or was she? She was fun to talk to and I enjoyed meeting her at the Palace A for our rendezvous, but when I started to find myself thinking about her instead of thinking about painting, I made a determined effort to ignore those thoughts and dive back into my work.

One Sunday afternoon in my second semester, somewhere right at the cusp between winter and spring, we were sitting in the diner celebrating with the steak-and-egg special a positive review of my recent work by my committee. I held forth for Esme on the encouraging comments made by each of the professors. When I was done, she smiled and said, “Pat, that's terrific, but think how much weight you put behind what they say now. I remember a few months ago when by your own estimation they were fools.” That took a little of the wind out of my sails. Still, I could undeniably feel that my paintings were finally coming together and the creativity just seemed to flow down my arm and through the brush
onto the canvas. I knew I was on to something good, and nothing Esme said could completely dampen my spirits. Instead, I laughed at her comment.

She got up to go to the bathroom, and I sat paging through the catalog of a spring show that was to hang in the university gallery and would include some graduate student pieces and some by well-established professionals. I'd been asked to put a piece in that show, and I was ecstatic. When she returned, I was looking at a page with a reproduction of a painting by the artist Thomas Dorphin, the best known of the artists who would be at the opening.

“What's that you're looking at?” she asked as she slid into the booth.

“A piece by that guy Dorphin. Do you know his stuff?”

She shook her head.

“It's kind of like that Cy Twombly crap, only it looks three-dimensional, sort of like a mix between him and Lichtenstein.” Twombly had done a series of pieces that were scribbles, like a toddler loose with a crayon, on canvas and the art world was still agog over them. The painting by Dorphin was also a scribble, only the line was rendered with a brush and the illusion of three-dimensionality; instead of obviously being a line from a crayon, it appeared to be a piece of thick twine. The technique was pretty impressive, but it left me cold.

“Let me see,” she said.

I turned the catalog around to her and she drew it closer.

She looked at it for about two seconds, and I noticed a nearly undetectable tremor of surprise. Then her complexion went slightly pale.