The Daily Novel

1982
SoHo

Painting can be an evil mistress. She can love you tender and she can love you raunchy, and she can rip your guts apart.

When you put that last stroke on your canvas and you know you’ve done it right, and you step back to look at what you’ve done, a deep sigh comes all the way up from your loins and you say “Yes! Yes, by God, I did it.”

But it can also be like a cramp in the pit of your stomach that wrenches your intestines and won’t let go; because to make a painting you have to reach deep down inside and pull it out, and when it doesn’t come, it’s like the dry heaves. And the loneliness of it! The loneliness is unbearable. You’re all alone in a huge loft and you’re slinging paint with concentration so intense it’s exhausting, and when you finally set your paint bucket down and step back to see what you’ve done, there is not a soul to share that moment with, be it ecstasy or be it loathing; because you’ve experienced a rape or a battle or the most tender of caresses, and it was all between you and that goddamn canvas; and suddenly you get this memory flash from back when you were in art school and your professors ripped your work apart, and you look at your painting and you can’t even see it. You haven’t the slightest idea whether it’s art or crap. So you grab the freight elevator down to the street and you walk to the corner bar and get gloriously drunk.

***

Red Warner wrote those words. He wrote them in that bold scrawl of his. He wrote them in his journal not long after his final exhibition and that now-famous party that ended with a scream and a mad rush of fleeing bodies, and Red Warner slumped on the floor in a pool of blood like the day’s washing from a slaughterhouse.

He also wrote in that hallucinatory journal:

After that I went berserk, raving around town with Cassie at my heels trying valiantly to hold me back.

Time now expands and contracts. Memory and dreams and imaginings all become twisted like taffy in the hands of a madman. I’m sitting in a green aluminum boat on the bayou, recuperating. A dirty bandage. Warm beer, the taste of bile in my mouth. Confused memories. Brother Barnes in his black suit worn silver at the elbows, and wearing a white shirt and skinny black tie that cuts into his puffy, red neck like wire on a post, shouting, “Oh you vile generation of fornicators and blasphemers!” And I’m racing around the loft, swinging a butcher knife, and blood is gushing like gooey cadmium red squeezed from a tube, and the ceiling beams are swelling as if pumped with helium and they’re swirling and swirling in a slow motion pool of crimson and black.

My comings and goings are like debris in a tornado, all whirling and blowing and converging like the eye of the storm in a single moment and a single place. And Redneck Red Warner is the “I” of the storm when some two hundred or so idiots crowd into my loft. Whores and pimps off the avenue and leather boys from the West Side bars and a slew of artsy hangers-on, and some dame named Dianna wearing black lace undies and spike heels and nothing else. Couples of both sexes groping each other. Air dense with the smell of marijuana and cigarette smoke. Something snaps in my mind again, and again and again, and suddenly I’m standing on top of a table in the kitchen area, shouting words from the Book of Job in the Bible — words that I never remember reading. I’m standing in the pulpit, calling them sinners to repentance, shouting with a righteous rhythm and providing the A-mens my own self.

If in bed I say,
A-men!
When shall I arise?
I am filled with restlessness…
Filled with it, filled with it!

I am filled with restlessness until the dawn. My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle; they come to an end without hope. Remember that my life — My life, sweet Jesus — it is like the wind; I shall not see happiness again.
I jump off the table and grab a butcher knife from the counter and start weaving through the crowd, swinging the blade like a sword and screaming, “Scabs on humanity! Your days are numbered. Fornicators and liars, sucking off my fame and my talent.”

I rip my shirt off and fling it away.

The idiots applaud. They started ripping their own shirts. Tattered garments in the air.

“I rend my garments!” I scream, “I’m a weird, wacko, washed-up fool who can’t even put his queer shoulder to the wheel (borrowing from Ginsberg). I used to be a simple country boy from Mississippi, but my pecker got me in a mess of trouble.”
… And I raise the knife high over my head and shout…

***

I slammed the journal pages shut. I could not read the next sentence. I did not have to read any more to find out the next chapter in Red Warner’s story, because I was there with him. One way or another I’d been with him all along.

I knew him when he was a kid, before he took the name Red, back when he was plain ol’ Travis Earl Warner. We grew up together. We were close. I was with him from the first time he played hooky back in Church Street Elementary School until he graduated from Tupelo High and went off to study art at the Memphis Art Academy. But I was not with him when he was the only witness in a murder case and had to give testimony that would send one or another friend to prison, and I was not with him when he fled Tupelo in shame. Later, when he became famous, I followed him from a distance, keeping up with his shenanigans through the art magazines and the stylish gossip rags. Finally, when he vanished after that last show and everyone was wondering whether he was dead or alive, I took it upon myself to find him — traveling to Tupelo to put the pieces together, talking to Mama Marybelle, trying to figure out what turned Travis Earl Warner into Red Warner, trying to figure out what made him freak out the way he did, and trying to figure out if he was still among the living (which I never really doubted) and if so, where he might have gone.

To tell his story right, I need to tell it the way I told it to Jimmy on that long drive from New York to Tupelo. I’ve got to start back before Travis and I were even born. I’ve got to tell about his grandfather, Rudy Sullivan and his mother, Marybelle, and the Warner family, who more or less adopted Marybelle when she was carrying Travis in her womb.

Tupelo, Mississippi
1919

In the fall of 1919, Rudy Sullivan walked into the imposing lobby of the Warner Bank. Smack in the middle of the lobby there was a fishpond, skirted by tropical plants. A dozen goldfish swam lazily in that pond. Rudy sidled up to the pond, his red, lumpy hands crushing the shapeless hat that he held against the crotch of his overalls. He dipped his hat in the water and wrung it out, then used the wet hat as a rag to wipe his sweaty brow, pushing aside the unruly strands of red hair that were sticking to his eyebrows. A bank teller pointed him out with a curt nod of her head, and said something to the customer who was standing at her window, a plump young woman with a severe hairdo. The young woman turned to look at Rudy. She shook her head and contorted her face into an expression that said, What’s this world coming to? She stuffed her money into her purse, snapped it shut, and huffed to the door.

Rudy Sullivan recognized her. She was the new teacher at Tupelo High, where he worked as custodian. Mabel Cook by name. She directed the school choir and was a stickler for penmanship and insisted students address her as Mrs., even though she was an old maid. When not teaching, she spent her time playing piano for Calvary Baptist Church or teaching private music lessons in the parlor of her little house on the hill across the street from the old diner.

“Afternoon, Ma’am,” Rudy drawled.

She swept past him and flung open the outside door. Nearby, another door stood partly ajar. The name inscribed on its brass plate was: Charles Warner, President. Rudy approached Charles Warner’s office with a sideways gait and leaned around to peek in. Seeing that the office was empty, he sat down on a lushly padded wooden chair with an elaborately carved back and claw feet. He sat forward on the edge of the seat, his demolished hat clamped between his knees.

“Excuse me, sir,” a lady said, “is there something we can help you with?”

“No Ma’am. I’m waitin’ to see the coach, uh… Mr. Warner.”

“I’m sorry, but he is not here right now. Could someone else help you?”

“Oh no Ma’am. I got to see Mr. Charlie. I don’t mind waitin’.”

Charles Warner was a legendary figure in north Mississippi, and Rudy Sullivan had seen the legend take shape. He had been in the stands at Tupelo High the year before the war broke out when Charlie had scored three touchdowns against Fulton. He had stood on the curb in front of the Rexall Drugs at the end of that war when Charlie had marched down Main Street in his uniform, with tears glistening in his eyes and medals sparkling on his chest, confetti flying, and people weeping. Charlie had been awarded the Purple Heart and the big one, the Medal of Honor, and he limped, because he had taken one in the leg.

Charlie’s father had died at an early age. Charlie was in Europe at the time and did not receive the news until the war was over and he was on his way home to be greeted by Tupelo with a hero’s welcome. Privately he was welcomed home by his wife, Becky, and his two-year old son, Chuck, whom he had never seen. Almost immediately he had to take over the responsibility of running a bank that had been held together by mostly luck since his father passed away. Charlie stuffed his uniform into a trunk, dug a suit out of mothballs, and walked into the respectability and fortune that was his rightful due as heir to an old and worthy family, and as Tupelo’s most illustrious son.

Rudy Sullivan’s world was far removed from Charlie Warner’s, even if the little shack where Rudy lived in East Tupelo was only a thirty-minute walk from the Warner Bank. His shotgun shack was perched on a rise in the middle of a field that was flooded half the year, in that godforsaken bottomland that splays out between the fairgrounds and the red clay cliffs east of town.

Some of the guys who hung out with Rudy in the cafe down on East Main had been known to make some pretty nasty remarks about the Warners, and about anybody else who had more than five bucks for that matter, calling them money grubbing and tight fisted. Having never been the kind of guy who liked to argue a point unless he had to, and not really caring too much one way or another, Rudy always let such comments slide. But back at home he’d talk about it to Nora Lee, saying things like, “Some folks are downright spiteful. They’s folks that hate old Charlie just ’cause they ain’t got nothing and he got just about everything. But I figure God’s got His purpose in making some folks rich and others poor, and if anybody deserves to have it made, I reckon that’d be Charlie Warner. ‘Sides, didn’t he ask me to help him move in when he bought the Simpson house, and didn’t he pay me right good? And when he built the ballpark for the kids and asked people to donate their help, didn’t I work ’til after dark three days running without ever asking for a red cent? I say one hand washes the other. That’s what I say.”

The afternoon sun cast violet shadows across the Warner Bank lobby. Rudy watched the shadows crawl over the edge of the fishpond, creating cool spots into which the goldfish settled. After a while he heard the uneven clump of Charlie Warner’s approaching steps. When he stood up to intercept him, a secretary scurried to place herself between them. She said, “This gentleman has been waiting to see you, Mr….”

“Hey Rudy. How’s the missus?” Charlie broke in, signaling the secretary to get back to her desk.

Rudy said, “We’uz all just fine, Coach… uh, Mister…”

“You wanted to see me?”

“Yassuh, I uh…”

“Well come on in. Have a seat.”

Charlie directed Rudy to a chair next to the mahogany desk. The office was rich in manly browns. A profusion of photographs covered the wall: family photographs, his high school class picture, shots of Charlie and Ed Hooper and some other man proudly hefting strings of speckled trout on a pier in Gulfport.

“What can I do for you, Rudy?” Charlie asked.

“Well Coach, it seems I done gone and got my Nora Lee in a family way.”

“That’s wonderful, Rudy.”

“Yassuh. Sure is. But this ain’t the first time. She done lost two younguns and she’s mighty sceered this time. Doc Littlejohn told her she best not try birthin’ at home again, and… well, to tell the truth, I cain’t afford to put her in the hospital.”

“Don’t you worry, Rudy. We’ll work something out.”

Rudy stood up. He said, “I ain’t gonna take no charity, Coach. What I thought was, maybe I can do some work for you. I know you got that big house on Magazine Street. Must be a tol’able ‘mount of work needed around a house that big.”

Charlie knew good and well that Rudy’s health was not good, and that it was all he could do to hold down his job at the school and try to keep that miserable little dirt farm of his from killing him. “I’ll tell you what, Rudy,” he said, “I can’t think of much that’s needed by way of building or yard work — maybe come spring — but there’s a powerful lot of cleaning and what-not needed inside. Now, the way I see it, it’ll be a few good months before Nora Lee gets too far along to tend house, and we need a good housekeeper. If she could help Becky with the ironing and housecleaning, we could pay her a decent wage. Then after she has the baby and is back on her feet, we can take out of her pay, say five dollars a week. That way it won’t be charity, not really. I’ll pay the doctor and Nora Lee’s wages’ll take care of it, and you’ll never miss the money. Besides, Becky could really use the help.”

Rudy sat back down and muttered, “That’s awful good of you, but that’s… that’s nigger work.” Immediately he jumped back to his feet, and in a rush of apology said, “Shucks, I shouldn’t a said that. Nawsuh, I didn’t mean it a’tol. It’s mighty kind of you. Nora Lee’ll be glad to work for your missus. I’ll tell her right away. We’ll be beholden to ya.”

1982
The New Cedars Bar
Manhattan, New York

The New Cedars Bar was dark inside. A deeply scarred mahogany bar that looked somewhat like a whale washed onto shore dominated the narrow room. Diffracted afternoon light slanted through dusty windows that opened onto Broome Street, casting a parallelogram net of yellow on the hands of chess players who nursed their beers while plotting their next moves. A stream of dust motes floated from there to the corner booth where Randall Jarrett, the art critic, lounged in his black suit, watching the men at the bar. They were an intimate group, argumentative and familiar. They arranged themselves casually on their bar stools in a triad, like a Renaissance composition, with the burly redhead in the center. He was wearing paint-splattered overalls and a plaid shirt with a frayed collar. He sat loosely on his stool, and his heavy body lurched when he laughed — which he did often and loudly. Everyone in the New Cedars Bar turned at the sound of his booming laugh.

He swiveled around and hefted his beer mug as if proposing a toast, and announced, “I’m for an art that ejaculates!”

Randall Jarret smiled to himself with a smile that said here he goes again.
A group of out-of-towners who had drifted in carrying packages from a nearby boutique stopped and looked at each other, questioning their choice of bars.

Red Warner bellowed, “I’m for anarchistic art!

Someone shouted, “Amen!”

Red bellowed, “I’m for an artist who turns down galleries.”

“Right on!”

“I’m for an artist who vanishes, only to reappear ten years later as a fisherman living in the wilderness.”

“Yeah!”

“I’m for Goya’s madness and van Gogh’s ear and Rothko’s suicide! I’m for confrontational desperational art!”

Randall Jarrett shook his head, wondering where he had heard it before, that repeated phrase, “I am for an art, I am for an art.” It was something he should know. Red Warner was quoting somebody, but Jarrett couldn’t figure out whom.

A big grin played across Red Warner’s face. Blue eyes alive like lasers, red-rimmed and swollen, he scanned his audience, recognizing the art critic in the corner. Good. With any luck his aphorisms would be quoted in Wednesday’s paper. It had been a long time since his name had been in print, and he needed any publicity he could get — especially now, with his show scheduled to open in two weeks and his career on the downturn.

Red Warner had come to New York from a little town down south. He had come to town, and he had made it. Made it big. His paintings were on the cover of Art News and Art Forum. He showed up in gossip columns and was considered a must on the guest lists of anyone who was anyone. He was, for a while, the darling of the art world; famous for his outrageous way of talking, a hybrid of Beat Era speed rapping and Southern revivalist preaching, for his legendary debauchery, and, of course, for those harshly dramatic abstract paintings that made viewers so deliciously uneasy. But at the height of his career his work fell out of fashion. Critics said he was undisciplined and accused him of repeating himself — as if every other artist in New York didn’t do the same, as if the market and the gallery system and those self-same critics (particularly Randall Jarret ) didn’t demand it of them.

His dealer, Leo Garner, threatened to drop him if his next show was not a success, and he had been painting with a vengeance for the past month, determined to shock the art world with a new, more powerful Red Warner. He had been living on speed and booze and coffee and cigarettes, going without sleep until he dropped, stopping his frenzied work only long enough to stagger down to the New Cedars Bar to make an occasional appearance.

The chess players and the art critic and Red’s fellow artists at the bar all swam in a haze of tears before his burning, booze-bleary eyes. He said, “I am for an art that destroys itself through its own excesses. Down with namby-pamby, non-committal art. Down with no-hand-of-the-artist art. Down with…”

What? Red Warner had never before been at a loss for words. Years before he had created and perfected a public persona that he called the Redneck Dean Moriarty, an alter ego patterned after Kerouac’s character from On The Road, with a heavy dose of Southern black and revivalist preacher lingo. This character was never at a loss for words. He could spew forth an endless tidal wave of poetry, with never a pause to let his thoughts catch up.

So how could he end his dangling sentence? He thought quickly and said, “Down with this beer,” and swigged the liquid down in a series of great gulps. Then he pushed himself off the bar stool and walked out of the bar and across Broome Street. Everyone in the bar watched him step onto the loading dock and unlock the freight elevator and disappear into his loft, where he had been working on a new series of paintings. Word was this new work would either be the most revolutionary thing since de Kooning’s Woman I or the pitiful, dying gasp of a no-talent painter who had made it big on sheer bravado. Most bets were on the latter, partly out of envy.

TO BE CONTINUED