4
It was four in the morning. I was walking to the subway station to look for my cousin, Monica. Monica may have killed herself a couple of years back. I’d seen the coroner’s report, but it was a NYC report, and everyone knows how often they get things wrong. I hadn’t seen the body so, as far as I was concerned, her death was only a rumor.
I live in a world of imaginary paintings. They have taken the place of my imaginary friends. My imaginary friends were a treacherous and surly lot.
I didn’t find Monica, but ran into her brother, Hubert, looking in the window of a jewelry shop at expensive watches, encrusted with gold and diamonds and other precious stones, timepieces that a tsar would have worn. I looked down at Hubert’s wrist. He was wearing a plastic Timex with blue trim. It looked like something a child might wear, or a man used to being unemployed. I’d shopped for watches recently and I knew you could get one of those for thirty-four dollars. As a matter of fact, I’d bought one. It was a remarkable coincidence.
I asked Hubert, “Is it true that Monica committed suicide?”
I am sorry. I have lived too long with imaginary friends, with imaginary paintings. My father told me I was a bum and would always be a bum. That was at a critical stage of my development. Thus, I flirted with becoming a Jesus freak, but didn’t give in. Bob Dylan gave in. He painted his face like Batman’s Joker and declared: You’ve got to serve somebody. Bullshit! The only person you’ve got to serve is yourself at the ALL YOU CAN EAT buffet. Also your legless wife—she can’t serve herself. She was a hero in the Iraq War—she had her legs blown off. That’s how you can tell she’s bona fide.
Hubert didn’t answer. He held his watch to his ear and shook it. Hubert’s father was my mother’s brother. He killed himself after his second career as a banjo player failed to achieve traction.
I have imaginary Picassos on my walls, imaginary van Goghs, imaginary Rembrandts and Matisses, and all of my paintings are better than the real paintings by the same artists. I have a collection worth billions of imaginary dollars. How much am I worth? My worth is an illusion. This is true of all of us.
Hubert’s current occupation was caring for his demented mother.
His lifetime profession had been catalogue photography. He specialized in taking photos of chairs and couches and home appliances. I had spent some time admiring his work. Then the bottom of market for that sort of thing fell out.
“Answer my question. It’s a simple yes or no,” I said.
Hubert refused to speak. For him, there were no simple questions.
It was now five in the morning. Hubert suggested that we adjourn to the donut bar.
He ordered a cruller, then went to the john. I figured that, with all his digestive problems, he might take a long time. I pulled a Henry Miller book from the pocket of my corduroy jacket and read a passage.
“Hail to you, sweet lice,” I thought and passed on. A mist was rising over toward Gowanus Canal. Probably a glacier melting.
Even in 1960, Henry Miller was hip to global warming. He walked a lot, from one end of the city to the other and back, like my Uncle Eddie, who acquired the habit in the Rumanian Army, where they marched to one border and back again.
Eddie had flaming red hair and later opened a clothing store in Manhattan, and either did or did not cheat the Negroes who bought their work clothes there.
Hubert came back twenty minutes later. He’d forgotten that he’d already ordered. He aimed stink-eye at the cruller that was sitting at his place, as if it were there to insult him.
Mist was rising over the Gowanus Canal. The next ice age was coming. The continents were preparing to move back together into one huge land mass.
