FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #4

For a long time they said we didn't need one, but then something changed and they said that we did. They assumed that all of us—every artist, street performer, and preacher—was a secret commie waiting to rally the East Village proletariat into a bloody revolution. In truth, most of us were socialists, but the only revolutions we were concerned with were the aesthetic ones, ones that dealt with Coltrane or Warhol or a well-formed human sculpture. But that didn’t matter to the city council and the mayor, and so they told us to apply for a legal permit or drag our beatnik, free-loving asses out of Union Square.

I guess you could say that was the beginning of Stanley’s tragic downfall. The newspaper focused on the later chain of events, but I knew it was a long time coming. I was just an nineteen-year-old punk, taking creative-writing classes at NYU and hanging around Union Square spouting obscure poetry to anyone who would listen. But Stanley, who was finishing up his degree in Greek Literature, took his job much more seriously. Not the studying—being a performance artist. Every day, whether he had class or not, he donned a full-body, silver spandex suit. He painted his face silver, covered his hair with a silver shower cap, and wore silver gloves and booties. Then he stationed himself between the steps and the fountain on the southwest corner of Union Square and spent at least four hours holding classic poses, impressing young children and tourists with the utter stillness with which he could hold the “Thinking Man” or the “Strong Man.”

The day before they told us to get permits, Stanley passed out mid-pose. It was a hot August afternoon, and he had been standing out of the shade for two hours as silver droplets of sweat dripped from his hair. I warned him to take a break and drink some water, especially because of the acid we had taken, but he ignored me.

When he passed out, everyone thought it was part of the act, but he didn’t get up. Eventually I went over there to splash some water on him, but this very short young woman—I thought she might be a midget—pushed me aside and checked to see if he was breathing and had a pulse, then shouted for someone to call an ambulance. She rode with him to the hospital, and when he woke up from what turned out to be heat stroke, she was the first person he saw.

Chloe was a nursing student. She wasn’t a midget, but was unusually short because of a birth defect with her spine that prevented it from growing properly. When she walked, her hip jolted as her left leg, which was significantly longer than her right, swung forward like a pendulum. Stanley didn’t know this when he woke up and saw her smiling at him with her thoughtful brown eyes, but he never minded anyway. He found her appearance severely beautiful and thought of  her as his Frida Kahlo, her physical condition a reflection of the inner suffering embodied in timeless works of art. These were the kinds of things he said at least, and I believed him. We were all insanely romantic then, and sometimes I wish I still were, though it didn’t turn out well for old Stanley.

While I was busy trying to be a poet, Stanley and Chloe fell in love. Their favorite activity was going to jazz clubs, where Chloe would dance to her own sporadic rhythm as Stanley sang out of key—creating their own awkward but perfect harmony. Stanley would spend hours discussing ideas about Art and Literature, and Chloe would try to convince him to think more about people. Although posing in a silver costume was nothing like administering health care to the sick and poor, she saw a connection between public art and public service, which was part of the reason she loved Stanley. She reminded him that the great Renaissance frescoes that adorned cathedral ceilings were once thought to be the closest human approximations of the divine, literal and spiritual thresholds between the masses and the heavens above. She didn’t need to tell him that Frida’s husband Diego Rivera—in addition to sharing Stanley’s love for physically debilitated women—was an active communist who created murals to bring joy and hope to the Mexican masses. In Stanley’s own quirky way, she liked to believe, he brought joy and hope to the masses of lower Manhattan.

But at the height of the Cold War paranoia and the city’s requirement for public permits—perhaps in spite of them—Stanley became more radical in his performance art. He begrudgingly got a permit, but also began wearing his silver outfit in bed, asking Chloe to pose naked with him as his friends—addicts, artists, and beat poets—captured the images in their respective art forms. At first she found it exhilarating to have her naked body appreciated so openly. But Stanley raised the stakes, pressuring her to perform sexual acts on him while he remained motionless in one of his statue poses. One night, during a collaborative piece with two of his friends, whose black spandex complimented his silver, he choked her while climaxing. After that incident, which he admitted went a little overboard, she made him choose between his lifestyle—including the drugs, performing, and sexual exploits—and her.

He didn’t have much of a choice. He was unabashedly in love, an aesthetic that trumped all his other artistic notions. Besides that, he had one semester left in college, no money or job prospects, and was considering undertaking the biggest creative endeavor of his life so far: having a child. So, he packed in the silver outfit and got a job as an English teacher in the South Bronx.

* * * 

I ended up getting married, moving to Brooklyn, and having kids, but they never did. According to Stanley’s diary, which I got hold of after his death, Chloe wanted to wait until her nursing career got underway, and when she was ready, they discovered that her body—with its tragic imperfections—could not support a baby. They considered adoption but got denied approval because of Stanley’s drug charges from his years as a street performer. Before they knew it, they were forty and childless.

Teaching wasn’t what Stanley had imagined either. Instead of spreading Literature to the masses—a literary version of Diego—he spent his days pushing his cart from classroom to classroom, trying for forty-eight minutes at a time to keep his students quiet enough to bestow upon them some literary truths that he had once thought important. Some days he still felt alive, as if the classroom were his stage, but most days he felt like a homeless man with that cart, lost in the halls of Roosevelt High, begging his students for a moment of their time—and could they spare an old man a homework assignment or two?

One such a day, after failing to interest his students in the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, Stanley came home from work and pulled out that old silver outfit. When Chloe got home, she saw him practicing old poses in the living room with a beer in one hand, an absurd reflection of the young man she had fallen in love with. He now had a graying beard streaked with silver paint, and his belly bulged out in the spandex waistline.

Chloe recoiled as Stanley tried to explain that the outfit might help him recapture the passion he once had for performing and art and their relationship.

She didn’t buy it. Sure, she understood his qualms about teaching, but he could get out of the Bronx and find a cushier position with his own classroom in Manhattan. They could renew their vows and return to Paris for a second honeymoon. He could turn in his car and get a new lease on a flashier model. She would support anything to rekindle their marriage, but not that—and everything that came with it.

He fell back onto the couch and said he didn’t know what had come over him. He would throw away the outfit for good and look for other teaching jobs, maybe at a school in Manhattan where he could have his own classroom. That, he insisted, was the real problem. A man his age with his experience ought to have his own classroom. 

He took a shower and, after drying off, held the spandex suit over the trashcan. He glanced at his pale, flaccid body in the mirror and thought about pushing that goddamn cart around the next day, and the next day. It was true he needed his own classroom, but he needed more than that. He wrapped the silver outfit in a plastic bag and tucked it into the far corner of the cabinet under the sink. It would be safe there for at least a night without Chloe finding it.

 

The next morning, after retrieving the silver outfit, he stashed it the only place he knew it would be safe: on his body. He wore the spandex beneath his trousers and shirt and cut the neckline so that it wouldn’t stick out from his collar.

At the start of his first class, Stanley felt the smooth fabric against his skin and experienced a wave of arousal that he hadn’t felt in a long time. Instead of quieting the class to teach, he let himself bask in the feeling. After a few minutes, some students grew concerned and others began shouting and throwing crumpled up balls of paper at him.

Stanley stood frozen, fixing his eyes on a point in the back of the room. He remembered what he had loved most about performing: the feeling of being anonymous and the center of attention at the same time.

* * *

Stanley wore the spandex beneath his work clothes for about a week, reveling in his secret while growing more distant to his students and wife. He usually got home and changed before Chloe did, but on the night of parent teacher conferences he got home after her. The food was already on the table, and Chloe refused to let him shower and change before eating. He sat down nervously, hoping to God that she wouldn’t see a sliver of silver sticking out of his collar.

Without warning, she dropped the bomb: “Stanley, I’m leaving you.”

He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, loosening his tie and undoing his top button.

Her eyes went wide.

“I can explain,” he said.

“No,” she said, “let me explain.” And then she told him that she had been cheating on him with his principal, and the two of them wanted to be together.

Stanley grabbed her wrists and pulled her to him, digging his silver-polished nails into her skin. He took her trembling hands and thrust them into his open shirt onto his silvery chest.

“Stop,” she said, but he violently clenched onto her hips and pulled them toward his. She tried to push away but his hand reflexively grabbed her throat. She released a muffled scream and his grip went slack, allowing her to squirm free and run out the door.

Her scream rang in his ears as he stood frozen, only beginning to grasp what had just happened. Through the cloudiness he could imagine her hobbling to the street corner and hailing a cab to her sister’s apartment in Midtown, the one with that god-awful Starry Night poster, which he knew she had bought for twenty bucks at a museum gift shop.

He stripped down to spandex, put on some Coltrane, finished the bottle of wine, and drifted off into a world of statues, of sculpted arms and thighs and the more delicate parts.

* * *

The last time I saw Stanley was about a week later. I was managing the Barnes and Nobles on Union Square and decided to eat my lunch outside on the square. I hadn’t talked to Stanley in years and couldn’t believe he was still doing the statue routine.

He was striking a pose with his legs apart, one hand on his hip, and the other in a fist beneath his chin. The Thinking Man. One of his favorites.

I considered saying hello but a police officer beat me to him.

“Excuse me, sir. The association for the liberation of Tibet has a permit to hold a rally here. You’ll have to do your thing somewhere else.”

Stanley did not move or respond.

“Sir, you’re going to have to move or I’m going to help you move.”

Stanley snapped out of his pose. “Are you fucking serious?”

He walked off and the police officer returned to his post. I watched as Stanley bought a bag of almonds from a street vendor and sat down on the edge of the stone fountain. He punched a number into his cell phone—I assume Chloe—but got no response and slammed the phone shut. Then he put his head in his hands and started sobbing.

People gawked at him convulsing in his silver outfit, and I felt sorry for the guy. I figured he had gotten carried away with drugs and told myself there wasn’t anything I could do. The truth is, I just didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t want to admit that he was a burnout doing the same sad routine and I was a failed poet who took solace in running a commercial bookstore. Of course I didn’t know then that he would—in his own way—leave a lasting impression as an artist. He would finally get his fifteen minutes of fame, and that’s more than some people can say in their lifetime.

* * *

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, signaling the beginning of the end of European communism. That afternoon, as the news broke in the United States, Stanley got a voice-mail from his wife-stealing principal informing him that due to his string of unexcused absences he no longer had a job. There was no message from Chloe.

Stanley went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and walked among famous paintings of nudes and mothers clutching babies and Christ in various postures and degrees of suffering. He stood before each work enthralled, absorbing each sight as if for the first time, like a newborn.

Then he started crying.

Sitting on a bench in the lobby, he penned his final diary entry. He wrote that he realized something he had known for a long time: art was the only thing a person could count on. Your career would never pan out how you intended it, you would never attempt half the romantic things you said you would do in your youth, and the woman with whom you said you were going to do those things, the one who could not bear you a child, would see you for the schmuck you were and cheat on you, and you would end up alone. You would never overcome that emptiness, which had really been there all along, but at least you could express your existence in its sad, complex, beautiful, fucked up truth through art, and that would be the best you could do. That was something you could count on. 

* * * 

With the diary in his back pocket, Stanley took the short cab ride to Chloe’s sister’s apartment in Midtown. Before getting to the door, he could hear his wife moaning from inside the apartment. He felt like vomiting but steeled his nerves for his final performance.

He pulled out the emergency key that Chloe had forgotten to take with her when she left. He paused and unlocked the door. As it swung open, the first thing he saw was that damned Starry Night poster. Then his wife’s buttocks came into view, riding atop the hairy thighs of his principal. Chloe turned around and, seeing Stanley, fell off the principal and covered her small breasts in one clumsy motion.

Stanley walked across the room as the two scurried to cover themselves. They frantically told Stanley, who was now picking up a wooden cutting board, not to overreact. The principal was fumbling in his pants with one hand, presumably for a cell phone to call the police, and raised his other hand in protection. Stanley sliced the board through the air sideways, striking the principal’s face with the hard narrow edge. Three more blows and he was dead.

Screaming, Chloe tried to run, but her hip gave out and she fell.

Stanley pounced on her and stuffed his silver cap into her mouth. Straddling her, he screamed, “Look what you did to me!”

He heard scrambling noises in the neighboring apartment and knew his time was running out. He tore open his spandex, revealing his naked body: the hairy pectorals like foothills at the base of his round stomach, and in its shadow his limp manhood and unsculpted thighs.

“Look at me!” He shook her. “You used to love who I was. Why wasn’t that enough?”

She trembled as he wiped tears from his eyes and from hers. Then he pulled her up and sat her in a chair, like a child, next to the window overlooking the front of the apartment building. He opened the window as the police ran down the hallway toward the apartment. She could have run away, but perhaps knowing what was coming—in a final gesture of love or pity—she remained seated.

Stanley looked at her one last time.

His Weeping Woman, his Frida.

Then he stepped onto the ledge and executed his final pose, The Leaping Man, thirty-three stories above concrete. As he fell through the air, naked and pale, arms spread out like Christ, he probably felt as the great artists did while completing their last glorious masterpieces.

back to Contest #4