“During Luke’s extended stay with Malcolm [in Portraits of an Imaginary Young Man], Soloman gains a wealth of knowledge and experience that helps him greatly in his quest. His eyes are opened to an alternate way of viewing his own life, and his heart is opened to a better way of managing his own feelings. He even meets quite the interesting character at a Halloween party one night, who quickly reveals to him two astonishing truths about himself that change him forever.” —Reader Views

“Portraits of an Imaginary Young Man is truly Joycean in its savagely relentless interface with Experience.” —Alec Sebastien, Paris, France

THE PAINTED WORD (from Portraits of an Imaginary Young Man)

Located near the corner of Kinbote and Shagwell, diagonally from one of Endurance’s ubiquitous Dunkin’ Donuts and adjacent to a sprawling steelyard purportedly owned by one of Rhode Island’s Mafia bosses, the Funhouse occupied the entire fourth floor of a Reconstruction-era tool and die warehouse that was now home to a hodgepodge of socially marginal individuals like Malcolm and myself engaged like Malcolm and myself in a variety of creative activities, licit and otherwise.

The warehouse itself belonged to the aforementioned Mafia boss, who also owned Arnolfini’s up at DiMaggio Square, the best Italian restaurant in Liberty Hill and one Malcolm and I frequented almost daily. I’ve always had an Achilles heel for brunettes and Italian cuisine.

But not even the best piece ever came close to Arnolfini’s antipasti, their arugula salad sprinkled with gorgonzola and black walnuts, their jumbo stuffed shells. At the mere mention of Arnolfini’s, my spirits have a way of soaring. I’d lop off my big toe to be able to sit down—right here, right now—to a steaming plate of Arnolfini’s spinach linguini in a robust cream sauce with a side of prosciutto sliced paper-thin over wedges of ripe cantaloupe, the whole thing washed down by several glasses of house Valpolicella topped off by a serving of finely shaved lemon Italian ice …

But to return to the Mafia boss, our landlord, who also happened to be the mayor of Endurance. Not only was he an outstanding amateur chef with his own line of award-winning pasta sauces, he was also a kind, caring and compassionate landlord: fair in his rents, loyal to his renters, never meddlesome as long as he was paid regularly, which I can assure you he was.

Everybody knew the story of the time he caught an underling making moves on his wife and proceeded to tie up the poor sap, beat him senseless, burn holes in him with a cigar, then piss in his wounds. Everybody knew the story—it had been front-page news all over New England—and he was still reelected—twice—which was a powerful testimony to his character. By way of example:

When Malcolm’s Chevy van he used to transport his art and supplies was accidentally stolen by one of our landlord’s men—Rhode Island boasted the highest auto theft rate per capita in the nation, vehicles being its principal cash crop—our landlord made a personal appearance, dressed in a silver Armani suit and flanked by two bodyguards, also wearing Armani suits, to apologize. Within twenty-four hours Malcolm’s van was back in the lot sporting a fresh paintjob (emerald), a souped-up stereo system (Aiwa) and shiny new racing hubcaps (Goodyear). After that we never had to pay for a single meal at Arnolfini’s, where we were treated like foreign diplomats.

The warehouse’s first floor was occupied by DuraSkin Rubber, a tire recapping operation that mysteriously went out of business literally overnight soon after my arrival. One day the grease monkeys were down there noisily recapping tires; the next morning the whole place was gutted, leaving a honeycomb of industrial rooms where an insanely loud metal band named Slug Jerky started rehearsing three nights a week. This was also where the Trust Fund Kid, who lived just below Malcolm and me, liked to break in his deaf girls.

I never understood the Trust Fund Kid’s obsession with deaf girls until one evening when I found myself hanging out on the steps at the first-floor entrance. I can’t remember what I was doing down there, probably nothing. Before long, from inside the abandoned network of rooms, I started to hear this extremely high-pitched wailing like a wildcat in heat. That was the deaf girl. But then I also heard the most unbelievable stream of obscenities—stuff I wouldn’t consider printing—like some kind of twisted libretto riding atop the girl’s bestial music. That was the Trust Fund Kid. I realized then he was into deaf girls because he could verbally abuse them during sex—and they never knew the difference.

Once, at a party, just for the hell of it, because I really didn’t care for him, because as a human being he was a complete zero, but mostly because I was drunk, I took a swing at the Trust Fund Kid, whose real name was Fernando Alfonso Picardia. He’d grown up in Barcelona and sometimes, when he was doing his deaf girls, you could hear him climax in Castilian. I blacked his eye. The next day I went down and apologized with a peace offering of Sangre del Toro. But even though after that he sometimes jokingly called me “Lucky Luciano,” things were never again what you might call smooth between us.

An extended family of Korean jewelers occupied the second floor. I think they were Korean. Malcolm said they were. They pretty much kept to themselves. There were seventeen or eighteen of them in all, kids included, and they were counterfeiters who stayed busy from dawn to midnight churning out nearly authentic rings, earrings and necklaces at a rate unimaginable from any but nimble Asian fingers.

Malcolm and I used to sit out on the fire escape and watch them through their windows, which they always kept open, even in winter, because of the heat generated in their production process. Sometimes, on the rare occasions when we weren’t in the mood for Arnolfini’s, we grilled out there on the landing, cooking T-bones and veggie kabobs and raining charcoal sparks down through the jewelers’ open windows, which never failed to throw them into an oriental tizzy as they started jabbering at us frenetically in their pidgin English about chemicals and explosions. But either they were lying or we were lucky because nothing ever blew up.

The third floor was divided into two roughly equal studios. To the right coming up the stairs was the Trust Fund Kid’s studio, outfitted with expensive designer furniture. He sculpted huge sheet-metal amoeba-looking things to which he gave exotic women’s names: Natasha, Tatiana, Dyonisia, Berenice, Conchita … the not-so-subtle implication being that the Trust Fund Kid was an international man of mystery who got around.

To the best of my knowledge, he never sold a single one of his sculptures, but he certainly didn’t need to since he lived comfortably off interest. It was obvious the reason the Trust Fund Kid posed as an artist was the same worthy reason tens of thousands of others down through the ages have similarly posed: to get laid.

The other third-floor studio belonged to Psycho Bitch, whose real name I never knew as everyone called her Psycho Bitch, “PB” for short. PB was supposedly a painter but she never painted. A Goth, she spent most of her time playing in ways I don’t like to imagine with her thirty or so pet blacksnakes, which she kept in enormous glass terrariums but which from time to time managed to get loose (or were set loose?) and slither hither and thither throughout the building. For that reason we never had any problems with mice, but every once in a while you could be sitting in the Funhouse minding your own business and suddenly a massive blacksnake would drop on you from the ceiling beams.

Besides keeping Skinny Puppy cranked up all night—which in some ways, given the nature of the space, you could overlook—PB owned a fifty-pound leather medicine ball like they used for workouts in the old days that, whenever the urge struck her, she hurled from one end of her studio to the other. It rocked the whole building like an earthquake. Sometimes the urge to hurl it struck her for hours on end.

I’d lie in bed with the walls shaking around me like a tree house in a hurricane, calmly waiting for the roof to come crashing down around my ears. I shudder to think what it was like for the Koreans on the second floor. On several occasions I got out of bed, paid PB a visit and asked her to cool it. The last time I did this, just before the men from Coventry Hospital put her in a straightjacket and took her away, she refused to open her door and told me—in a grotesque, monstrous voice from somewhere inside—she hoped we all got AIDS and died.

Directly above us was the infamous fifth floor, vacant since 1986. The last occupants had been a close-knit coterie of female artists who’d had a falling out over some guy they all fell in love with, a state of affairs (so to speak) that culminated in the suicide, by hanging, there on the fifth floor, of one of the artists whose name was Janice—but not before the coterie collectively trashed the place in the Armageddon of their breakup. Five years later it still looked like a tornado had just swept through, leaving a telltale trail of broken glass, splintered wood, twisted metal and shattered sheetrock.

Malcolm and I used the fifth floor as an unofficial annex—mostly, after we cleared out an area big enough, as a place to set up his canvases to dry. Sometimes, though, especially during the long “Indian winter” when the rain and snow set in and sunshine became one of New England’s lost arts, we’d sit on the floorboards just shooting the shit while soaking in what feeble rays could be had through the skylights. The walls were completely covered with the most demented graffiti, including my favorites BEAT ME, DADDY! and BELLA’S A NASTY-TITTIED HO repeated everywhere in blood red, helter-skelter letters that sent shivers down one’s spine. More than once I could have sworn we had company on the fifth floor, that Janice’s unrequited spirit was skulking around in the shadowy debris.

The roof was a different story. The roof was a glorious place to be. To get to it we had to climb the fire escape, which could be tricky as most of the railing was either missing or rusted through. But once up there on the toasty shingles, it was like having a little piece of paradise to ourselves.

In the distance, beyond the steelyard, downtown Endurance shimmered against September’s aquamarine sky as the clear autumnal light projected a pastel skyline, Pittsburgh magically transformed into Venice with the sparkling buildings along the horizon begging for a bright cubistic rendering.

Malcolm and I would bask like sunning turtles letting sunshine penetrate every pore, every fiber, every cell, every thought, every daydream, allowing a sort of animal photosynthesis to reenergize us all the way to our DNA in preparation for the tremendous bursts of creativity and debauchery that inevitably ensued. Anticipating fall’s betrayal of summer, our thirsty skin drank in gallons of solar energy, deeply browning us against winter’s onrushing pale. Reveling in a midday buzz, a gentle breeze tickling my skin, there on the roof on the trembling bubble between seasons, it often occurred to me I’d had worse imaginary episodes.

***

One of the peculiar structural properties of warehouses like ours was that the fourth was the only floor that didn’t require support columns, which meant the entire space could remain open, which in the case of the Funhouse it mostly did—with a handful of notable exceptions:

The toilet and shower area, adjacent to;

The sink area, where we washed everything from teeth to paintbrushes to pots and pans;

Malcolm’s curtained-off bedroom in one corner;

My writing room (which Malcolm ribbingly dubbed the “Offal Office”) in the opposite corner reached by walking between the bowed legs of the most shocking of caryatids: a naked, lime green, fourteen-foot, anatomically correct, papier-mâché statue of Tina Turner on a bad hair day; and

My sleeping nook reached by climbing a collapsible aluminum ladder, opening wooden shutters and crawling through a three-by-three hole in the cinderblock wall. I slept like a baby—at least after PB was taken away—on my musty futon ravaged by cigarette burns from which, if one were so inclined, by relaxing one’s neck and allowing one’s head to hang backward from one’s pillow over the edge of the mattress (which was much easier, I discovered, after sex), one could, through a small window, obtain a marvelous orbital view of Endurance at night, the illuminated capitol, the downtown buildings alive and winking with lights.

The rest of the Funhouse (all 10,000 square feet) was a fantasyland of Malcolm’s eclectic aesthetics. He was first and foremost a 2D artist—the walls were a constantly kaleidoscoping tapestry as he sold and replaced paintings—but he worked masterfully in 3D as well. Besides Tina, in his four years in the Funhouse he’d sculpted a series of eight life-size plaster Harley-Davidsons with preposterous paintjobs and even more outlandish aerodynamics that you could actually sit on, in addition to a gigantic phallus crossed with a set of musical bellows called Bach’s Organ and three neon Styrofoam octopus chandeliers straight out of Dr. Seuss that actually lit up and blew the Funhouse fuses, especially when the tie-dyed Japanese lanterns hanging everywhere like supernovas from the ceiling were on. He’d also designed a set of twelve Box People, wooden apple crates attached one on top of the other, with a rope running through their middle loosely holding them together, and painted on their four out-facing sides with caricatures of famous and infamous people, such that, by rotating the boxes, you could create a virtually limitless number of comically disjointed individuals: Mary Lou Retton with John Candy’s ass, Lawrence Taylor with Gary Coleman’s head, Axl Rose with Bette Midler’s tits, Howard Stern with Rush Limbaugh’s belly …

We told time using two asynchronous grandfather clocks, upholstered in leopard skin, one at either end of the Funhouse; entertained guests around a massive coffee table that, examined closely, turned out to be an industrial fan that slowly rotated, creating a strong enough updraft to lift the occasional unsuspecting skirt; played Ping-Pong on a double table shaped and painted like a pair of enormous breasts, raised red nipples and all, with a tiny net between them; took naps on a mohair hammock strung between the refrigerator painted in camouflage and the 50s minibar covered in red velvet; swung on a skateboard swing high enough to kick the rafters; played pétanque on a court that dissected a small arboretum on the south side; strapped on Rollerblades and played hockey using Tina’s legs as the goal; listened to Brian Eno and Arvo Pärt over car speakers mounted inside painted conch shells on the walls in the glow of a standing traffic light we’d stolen from beside the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street.

Such, for nine months, was my blissfully carefree fictional existence. And I have Malcolm to thank for inviting me to live in the Funhouse, Malcolm who became my brother in a spontaneous combustion of identification, who shared my ardent devotion to the Art of Living, in whose burning passion for Experience I instantly recognized the twin flame to my own, one that would never be quenched by the rain and snow of pedestrian reality, would supply enough fire to keep his imagination lit through even the dullest of times (which truly try men’s souls), would fuel him to perform spectacular feats of shapeshifting and tap directly into the absurdly profound nonlinear logic that threads through the universe and somehow manages to hold it all together.

It was a treat sometimes to stop thinking and let Malcolm think my own thoughts for me, go off into one of his “dithyrambs,” as I called his inspired explosions of lyrical philosophy, on some subject just as dear to his heart as to mine, watch him gather himself at the gate then spring forth with all his rhetorical musculature in rippling relief into an extemporaneous yet superbly polished utterance, something along the lines of:

“We are playing in the Magic, Luke. Right here, right now, in the Funhouse, we are playing in the Magic. Playing in the Magic is the same as being in contact with It. It feels sort of like electricity, except It can’t be measured. You can’t even prove It exists. It just is. It, the Magic, is a hard thing to get a grip on because It technically isn’t a thing but is more like an environment, a semiliquid ecosystem in which one moves without being aware one is actually swimming, in which one is connected to all things and all things are connected to all things, and this is how a positive thought in Endurance can have a positive result in New Zealand, just like that, through It, by Magic, which makes as much sense as any puffed-up rationalist theory you’re likely to run across. The secret to tapping into the Magic is simply realizing It is there, everywhere, all around, inside you. The rest is cake. The Magic allows you to have your cake and eat It, too. And if you really mind your p’s and q’s, It will provide you with a tasty bedfellow and allow you to eat her, too!”

Malcolm’s story went like this:

He was originally from Taos, New Mexico, born to a Caucasian father and Navajo mother on the vernal equinox, March 21, 1967, which made him six months older than me and my springtime counterpart. Early on his father had split, then his mother had moved with him to Kansas City where he’d attended public schools and managed to scrape by without direction or enthusiasm. Eventually, at sixteen, he got a part-time job mopping the floors of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, a seemingly routine episode that changed his life forever.

While swabbing those marble floors one evening, alone in that vast cathedral of a space after the visitors had gone, he realized in an epiphany his true kindred spirits, his only real peers were people he’d never met before, people he’d never even have the chance to meet yet whom he understood intuitively, deeply, in his marrow—Blake, Bosch, Courbet, Munch, van Gogh—madmen all, visionaries who couldn’t not paint, shamans of the eye who exorcised their private demons through public rituals of shape and color, born artists obsessed with the visual image in and for itself.

“It has occurred to me, Luke, people encountering my work might very well think me insane. I imagine you must feel the same way. But tell me, what is insanity? The irony is that real madness exists in what we’ve been taught is the world. The irony is that this world is madness—and when people go ‘mad,’ as artists and poets and saints are forever doing, they’re actually going sane.”

Following his epiphany, Malcolm’s transformation was instantaneous. As a child, encouraged by his mother who, despite her poverty, appreciated fine art enough to check out copies of Matisses and Monets from the Kansas City public library and hang them for a month at a time in their shabby little apartment, he’d dabbled with watercolors and shown some precocity. But now, having at last connected with his calling, with his calling calling the shots, he began to paint with reckless abandon, dropping out of high school and squatting for studio space in an old barn just outside Lawrence until he had enough work for a one-man show at a gallery in Saint Louis that wowed the Midwestern art scene (if such a thing could be said to exist) and, through a series of high-level connections, landed him a full scholarship to RICA. Before he could even accept it, he had to complete his GED. Barely six years later, he was a graduate of one of the country’s top art schools and already beginning to show at avant-garde galleries in Boston and New York.

I say this was Malcolm’s story because, to be perfectly honest, at first I assumed it was just that: a story. In other words: a lie. Maybe an authentic one, maybe a genuine fabrication along the lines of the whoppers regularly told by yours truly, but a lie all the same. I thought he was making up (just as I was) every word of his “autobiography,” not because it was unbelievable but because he was unbelievable. He was like the American Dream come true and I’d long since concluded the American Dream was a nightmare.

It was a fact I personally witnessed and/or experienced on more than one occasion that his paintings (which ran the stylistic gamut from semipornographic cartoons to trompe l’oeil photo-realism) brought into being whatever they represented. Or to put it more bluntly, they created their own reality. When, for instance, Malcolm painted a snow-blasted cityscape, the very next day, with incredible timing, we got slammed by one of the biggest blizzards in Rhode Island’s recorded history during which, in a humanitarian gesture, we invited the prostitutes in from Shagwell Avenue and spent three memorable days and nights snowed in together …

Maybe this example could be explained away as coincidence. But what about Malcolm’s detailed painting of that famous scene of the Iraqi soldiers surrendering during the Gulf War before it happened? What about when Malcolm painted his father’s house in flames, his father whom he hadn’t seen or spoken to in over a decade, and early the next morning we got a call from the old man in Montana that his house had just burned to the ground?  What about when Malcolm painted my portrait down to the dirty flannel shirt I was wearing, having never even laid eyes on me, at least not since I’d escaped the limelight, and within minutes there I was knocking on his door?

So I was highly suspicious, initially anyway, on several levels.

One, I wondered if Malcolm was imaginary like Billy and me but I just hadn’t gotten around to “smoking him out.”

Two, if he was in fact imaginary, I wondered if he’d imagined me into being and not vice versa. The possibility had to be conceded. With Billy for some reason I always just knew we were mutually imagining each other, but what if I were unilaterally Malcolm’s creation, an objet d’art essentially no different from, say, his Box People?

Three, in a mind-boggling move that makes my brain hurt, I wondered if Malcolm had imagined Malcolm into being, which meant …

Four, I might possibly (even plausibly) be a figment of a figment’s imagination, which is to say as substantial as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, social justice, military intelligence or the war on drugs.

Minor things added to my misgivings: Malcolm’s love of Fig Newtons and Le Nozze di Figaro; the seemingly endless stream of cash and flesh into his life that patently smacked— hough, admittedly, without the sense of jaded surfeit—of Billy’s imaginary rose garden; the occasional off-the-cuff comment that raised my eyebrow such as when Malcolm casually remarked apropos of his undeniable good fortune, “You know, Luke, if I didn’t have a great life, I’d just have to invent one.”

Thus the Funhouse lived up to its name as a place where I stared at my uncannily-close-but-not-quite-mirror-image, my doppelganger imaginary (?) self, and I scrutinized Malcolm intensely without appearing to half fearing half hoping he’d made me up and I could wash my hands of the responsibility for creating myself once and for all.

Yet I was never able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt he was anything but real. The more time I spent around him, the more I became convinced he was, despite appearances, an extremely rare specimen of that virtually extinct American breed, the real man, one drawn along Blue’s lines with the same kind of cleverly disguised altruism, who similarly allowed his glory to shine softly like a rainbow on the eyes, hue melting into hue with nearly imperceptible grace.

***

Compared to the legions of so-called artists who waffle in great pendulum swings between wanting to be full-time bohemians and full-time yuppies; compared to the swarms of poseurs with their fake calculated audacity and vapid pseudo-intellectualism, their endless chin music devoid of action, their empty pipe-dreams; compared to all the would-be Picassos out there stretching and straining themselves to accommodate the System, Malcolm was the genuine article, a true creative vortex stretching and straining the System to accommodate him, constantly producing fresh and inspired material—and never, ever compromising his vision to curry anyone’s favor.

“I’ve always envisioned ‘selling out’ as the modern equivalent of what Lao-tzu calls losing the Way. Somehow, Luke, through thick and thin, I’ve managed to avoid selling out. I’ve stayed true to my nature, which means I’ve always been at least within earshot of the Tao. It’s important to fight, Luke, even if you have to redefine the term, cast ‘fight’ not as deadly struggle but as masterful wu wei—the effortless transformation of your opponent through the effortless transformation of yourself.”

When I first met Malcolm he was just (by chance?) embarking on a phase he referred to as “word art,” which he jokingly described as “all things that have gone before, plus whatever hasn’t,” but which in more sober moments he explained as deriving from, to quote Borges, an “impulse more profound than reason” that grew into a type of painting composed wholly of figures of speech—pun intended—in other words, paintings of language fragments translated into visual terms.

It was his most experimental work to date, these huge landscapes made entirely of painted letters coalescing into words and sometimes snippets of poetry or even whole sentences that simultaneously denied and reified the distinction between text and image while affirming, in a tongue-in-cheek way, the materiality of language. The first (and in my opinion, most beautiful) of his “word paintings” was an homage to Paul Klee, Landscape with Yellow Birds, reproduced here in black and white (fig. 2).

2. Malcolm Valkery, Landscape with Yellow Birds, 1991.

Malcolm was on to something and we both could feel it. People would stop by the Funhouse and, instead of the normal mindless banter, the usual vacuous socializing, stare mesmerized at his word paintings for hours. This included yours truly, a creature born and bred of words for whom these new paintings that slowly began to fill up the walls of my existence were like gigantic revelations, transcendental signifiers, word made thing on an epic scale.

Again and again I was so drawn into them I could actually feel myself dissolving, melting, fusing back into elemental me in that alphabet soup of vibrant letters. I’d have to close my eyes and pull myself away. It’s a wonder, really, I didn’t wander off into one of Malcolm’s word paintings and become lost forever.

You could argue that, as a novelist (of sorts), I was professionally, at least passionately, engaged in writing words about things. In nearly precise dialectical antithesis, Malcolm had discovered a way to paint things about words. This was where we ultimately connected, here in this logic-defying liminal zone between reality and representation we both crossed and recrossed as a matter of course, sometimes wittingly, sometimes not. Malcolm and I were truly brothers, even twins—though not identical, existing as we did on opposite sides of the glass—in the sense we were like two closely related instruments—say a violin and a cello—vibrating exactly in tune, alive inside with the resonant universe of language demanding expression.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.