The Daily Novel

***

I got the hell out of Tupelo. I drove day and night, stopping only for pee breaks and lunches on the run, all the way from Tupelo, Mississippi, to New York, New York. I carried with me a dream of freedom and fame and fortune, and voices from the past chased after me, nipping at my heels like pesky puppy dogs. To get away from them, I had to drive faster, work faster, live faster. I had to be somebody new: Red Warner, the manic genius, the wild and woolly beatnik from the South. I vowed to grab Baghdad on the Hudson by the balls and make it take notice.

Bah! For the first year or so, I existed in dull anonymity, a comatose fisherman adrift in a concrete sea, casting a wide net and hauling in nothing but the shattered shells of dreams. My home was a four-by-eight cubicle on the third floor of the Bleecker Hotel. The Bleecker was a prison where you paid for your cell. Mercifully, it has since been put out of its misery. There was no lobby, but only a tiny foyer with an elevator on the right and a locked door on the left coated with peeling forest green paint (who knows what goes on behind the green door?), and a counter, behind which the man took your money and handed you your mail (what mail?). The elevator was a cage. It went to the third floor, no higher; the upper floors were condemned. The cage opened to a bare hall. At the end of the hall were a bathroom with dirty urinals and a metal shower stall and once white, now stained and graffitoed walls. The whole floor shared this bathroom.

In my room, there was a cast iron bed and a nightstand. No chair. No dresser. A pole for hanging clothes. The transom over the door was open and paint-stuck forever in that position. The window was barred, with missing glass. The view out that window was a courtyard. Once, perhaps, it had been landscaped. Perhaps there had been tables or benches. Now it was a garbage heap. The tenants all slung their trash out their windows.

In the winter I stuffed a Salvation Army field jacket into the broken window to keep snow from blowing in. I slept in my clothes under a scratchy, green Army blanket. I ate in the soup line on 13th Street. Occasionally I picked up jobs from the day labor pool in a basement shop on MacDougal.

Sometimes I didn’t make it back to my room at night but would ride the subways until dawn. The trains were warm, and I liked their drumbeat sound. I was alone and scared, and I detested myself. Sometimes I’d head down to Christopher Street and hang out in the bars.

Days and days and dazed days, I walked the streets of Manhattan with Tupelo still in my mind, down around Wall Street, up through Chinatown and SoHo, the East Village, across to the Bowery and up to Washington Square, peeping in shop windows, yakking with the drunks and junkies and whores on the streets, sleeping in the grass in Washington Square Park. Once I saw some wacko walking around talking to himself, one of the hundreds that you hardly ever notice, and I started hollering at him, and he started hollering at me, and our voices bounced back and forth over the heads of the old Ukrainian gentlemen who played their endless games in the park at Houston and First Avenue. A whacked-out, off-key jazz improvisation of strident shouts. The whacko shouted at his gods and demons, and I shouted at mine, talking back to Josh Culpepper’s oily elocution and Hoss Williams’ taunting “Noth Yew! Noth Yew!” and the mumbling voices of all those good old boys and mild-mannered matrons who had crowded the courtroom and salivated for just-ice to quench their thirst, and the holier-than-thou boom of Brother Barnes warning ’bout hellfire and damnation.

Oh, mister preacher man and all y’all self-righteous mothers, don’t you know that our God is a loving god? Don’t you know He loves them po’ niggahs and dirty white trash and perverts and sickos mo’ than anybody! Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Oh Lord, I wish you’d strike ‘em all dead!

The Southern Baptists didn’t believe in purgatory, but somewhere along the line I picked up on the concept, and it made sense to me. I sought my own purgatory. I wanted to bottom out, to indulge in my most depraved fantasies. I dressed myself in metaphorical hair suits and flagellated myself mercilessly, believing that miraculously, through all that, I could cleanse my soul and come face to face with God and transcend this grimy world.

And I thought about Cassie. What would she think if she saw me? Would she even recognize me, or had I transformed myself like a werewolf prowling the night and slinking into hiding in the glare of day. She was in New York. She didn’t know where I was, but I knew where she was. She worked at a restaurant near Washington Square and sometimes danced in off-off Broadway shows. Her apartment was a small studio above Ye Waverly Inn at 16 Bank Street. I saw the nameplate over the buzzer: C. Warner, printed in that delicate hand of hers. I stood at the door many a time, staring at her name, imagining her upstairs, practicing her dance steps on the hardwood floor. But I couldn’t bring myself to push the buzzer.

And the famous artist who had come from the South to take New York by storm could not paint. How could I? I had no money for paint or canvas, and even if I had, there was no space for painting in my little cubicle. I bought Crayola crayons and did thousands of little studies for paintings that I told myself I’d some day do in oil. I worked at them obsessively, with little joy.
Eventually I pulled myself together, got a job, found a bigger place to live, and started painting for real.

I wanted to paint New York as only I could see it, to capture the color of oxidized metal and the suffocating mass of aged brick and stone buildings with scarred and layered, graffitoed walls, to recreate the indefinable hue of the lights under the West Side Highway and the purple shadows they cast, to build skeins of paint like the layered grit of shopping bag ladies with their many coats, to find an abstract form that spoke of the faded, Army green aura of alcoholics sleeping on the sidewalks, ashen faces and dull, boozy-pink rims around whitened eyes.

I wanted to distill it to its essence, to symbolize it with a few simple shapes. I tried, I tried. If the devil had come along and offered to buy my soul for the price of making me the artist I wanted to be, I would have signed on the line in a Noo Yawk second, but there weren’t no devil except for the devil in my head, so I did the next best thing—I begged for money from home.

Papa Chuck came through like a champ. For six months, I lived off his generosity. I found a cheap loft. Yes, that was still possible then. I quit my job. I painted in a desperate fury, knowing that Papa Chuck’s support would not last forever.

Oh, painting can be an evil mistress. The thrill of it can be like good sex. When you finish a painting and you know you’ve done it right, and you stand back and look at it, you shout, “Yass, by jingo! Yass! I done done it right.” But it can also be like pulling teeth or yanking hair out by the roots or rolling in the gutter in a drunken stupor or beating yourself over the head with a hickory stick, because you’ve got to reach deep inside and wrench it out of your guts.

And the loneliness! Oh Sweet Jesus Christ! You are all alone in a drafty old loft and you sling paint with a concentration tuned so fine it hurts, and then you set your paint bucket down and you look around, and there is not a living soul to share that moment with, be that moment ecstasy or be it loathing. The battle is just between you and that goddamn stoic canvas. And suddenly you get this flash of memory from art school where the professors ripped everything to shreds with their caustic criticism, and you begin to wonder if you could even recognize a real painting if it kicked you in the chops.

That’s when you want to crawl into your mama’s lap and cry until the fear goes away. But you’re a big boy now, and you don’t really need your mama; you need a sweet woman’s caress. When I became so full of hurt and loss that I couldn’t stand it anymore, I sought solace in the only place I could get it with ease, in the bars on Christopher Street.

When I finally got in touch with Cassie, she was a lifesaver for me. I finally worked up the courage to ring her bell, and she invited me in as if she had been waiting for me. In a way, she had. She said, “I was wondering if you were going to ever come by.”

“I know. I guess I was ashamed of what I have become. I’m not too proud of myself these days.”

But she loved me and never judged me. She kept me from going completely out of my mind.

I finally hit on what I was after in my painting with my Hungry Frederick series. Hungry Frederick was a tall, stooped, taciturn black man who showed up on the soup line on 13th Street every day. I created a single, abstract shape to symbolize Hungry Frederick, a sloppy, angular wedge in dull, raw colors, with previous layers of paint showing through as on peeled billboards. Hungry Frederick was beaten by life, but huge and defiant and angry as hell. That was what I tried to convey in my paintings.

The paintings were abstract and minimalist in form, but not so clean and bright as minimalist paintings should be; they were harsh, sloppy, scratched, battered, layered. They were the abstract equivalent of beaten people whose spirit refused to die, the people that I, at least, always envisioned when I thought of Faulkner’s famous quote about the indomitable spirit of man.

***

Lord, there must be forty thousand artists in New York City. Maybe more. Eight million bodies in The Naked City. That’s what they used to say on the TV. Now there’s more like eleven million, and all but ten of them are painters, all scrambling for a gallery to peddle their work, with maybe half a hundred galleries that handle contemporary art, and each one handling no more than eight or ten artists.

Artists carry their work door to door. They send out slides. Seven thousand guys each forks over a twenty-dollar entry fee for a competitive show that chooses thirty painters. Talk about desperation! And they talk: What’s going to be hot next season? What’s going to be the next trend? Who do you know? Who do you blow? Scramble for connections. Get a hold of some grass, some coke; slip it to the right person.

Hell, I was no different. If the right opportunity came up, I might have done anything, no matter how depraved or unethical. But I didn’t have to. I made it on dumb luck.
I walked into Leo Garner’s Broome Street Gallery with half a dozen rolled-up canvasses under my arm. It was during a goddamn opening! There were people asshole to elbow, all sipping wine and puffing cigarettes and yack-yack-yacking. I’d bolstered myself with beer and some fine Colombian weed, and I brazened right in there, wearing my overalls and my patched shirt and my whole gol-durn Redneck Dean Moriarty persona. I flipped those paintings out on the floor right in front of Leo Garner and said, “I wanna see these right up there on the wall.”

Leo Garner looked at me with a bemused smile. He looked at the paintings. He looked at the people who had scrunched back to make room. He looked back at the paintings. He looked at the poor artist whose opening I was ruining. He looked back at me, and he said, “All right. I’ll give you a show. Come back and see me Monday afternoon. We’ll work it out. What’s your name, anyway, kid?”

“Thank you, sir. Thanks a heap. I can’t goddamn believe it.”

I was in shock. That sort of thing simply didn’t happen. In a daze I gathered up my canvases, folks staring at me gape-mouthed, and I walked out muttering, “I’ll be a double-damn hornswoggled motherfucker.”

When I talked to Leo the next week, he said, “You’ve got talent, son, but talent is only half of what it takes to be a successful artist. An artist today has got to be a media star, audacious, unique, and charismatic. When you busted into my opening and laid your paintings out… normally I would have thrown you out, but there was something about the way you did it, and there was something about those paintings. It’s always that indefinable something. Anyway, son, I think you can be a star.”

And I was. I became a star so fast, I was reeling from it. People invited me places. I never had to buy anything; folks were more than willing to give me anything I wanted: meals, clothes, booze, and sex. Cameras flashed everywhere I went. My mug was in all the magazines. I read about love affairs between me and people I didn’t even know. I was invited to lecture, to show, to appear all over the world. All expenses paid. My paintings were in museums, magazines, and textbooks. The funny thing was, hardly anybody ever bought my paintings. Two museums in ten years bought one each. One collector from New Orleans (I never even knew his name) bought most of what I sold.

For almost ten years, I was just about the most famous living artist in America, but I barely made enough money to live. Leo got tired of me, and the critics started cooling off. Cooling off? Hell, it looked like an ice age coming. My work began to change, and the critics didn’t like the changes. They started calling me a has-been whose undisciplined excesses were embarrassing and juvenile. That pissed me off. Wait ’till they see what Red Warner does next!

Time now expands and contracts. My life is a latex Halloween mask of some gleeful ghoul, twisted in the hands of a malicious child—me. 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 with his collar pinching his puffy, red neck, 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. Now I’m flat on my back on the hardwood floor in Cassie’s Bank Street apartment, feeling like I’m crashing from some hideously bad acid trip, and she’s cradling me in her arms and she is saying, “I love you, Travis. I love you. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Cassie cradles me in her tender embrace, and the healing sway of the fishing boat on the bayou cradles me in its rock-a-by-baby rhythm, and gradually I sort out the past and put it behind me. I’m beginning to think that happiness is possible.

***

My last show at Leo’s gallery was a disaster. The first review to come out said:

The most disheartening thing a critic has to do is witness the total disintegration of a once great artist. The sheer madness of Red Warner’s latest work, now at the Broome Street Gallery, attests to both the greatness of Warner’s talent and its misuse.

With his well-known reputation for high living and unbridled debauchery, it is no wonder that Red Warner’s art has degenerated. He has mastered his technique but seemingly does not know what to do with it. Warner’s latest paintings are incoherent and void of design or purpose.

The rest of the so-called critics followed suit. I was dead as an artist in New York, and I knew it.

After that I went berserk. I only remember snatches of it. I got drunk, and I stayed drunk, and I went raving around town with Cassie at my heels, trying valiantly to hold me back, hanging on like a cowboy on a wild bull. I stormed into the gallery and slung a bucket of white enamel at one of my paintings. Some woman howled like a hyena and I said to her, right before I dashed out the door, “Now ain’t that just purty as a picture.”
I was high and I was flying and I was mad as hell, and my comings and goings were 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: my loft. And Redneck Red Warner was the “I” of the storm.

Some two hundred or so idiots had crowded into my loft. God alone knows how they got there (I must have invited them). There were 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 who wore black lace undies and spike heels and nothing else. Couples were groping each other. Smoke was dense, and the smell of marijuana was pungent.

Something snapped in my mind. Suddenly I was standing on top of a table in the kitchen area, shouting, preaching. Paragraphs from the Book of Job in the Bible—words that I never remember reading—spumed from my mouth. I was 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?”

“When indeed, brother? When indeed? A-men.”

“Then the night drags on.”

“I am filled with restlessness…”

“Filled with it, filled with it!”

“Bless the Lord! Sweet baby Jesus.”

“I am filled with restlessness until the dawn.”

“Until the dawn. ‘Till that mammy lovin’ sun come peeking through.”

“A-men, brother Ben. ‘Taint much of a rooster but he loves his hen.”

“Take me home, sweet Jesus!”

“My flesh is clothed with worms and scabs; my skin crawls and festers.”

“Lawd have mercy!”

“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 jumped off the table and grabbed a butcher knife from the counter and started 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.”

They were laughing uneasily. Who was this madman? Was this an act? Hell-fire, Jack, how could they know? I didn’t know.

I ripped my shirt off and flung it away. The idiots applauded. Some of them started ripping their shirts. Tattered garments in the air. I screamed, “I rend my garments! 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.”

I whipped out my old tallywhacker right there in front of God and everybody, and commenced to prance around with it hanging loose like a sausage. Everybody laughed. I was a star once again. Still.

I said, “Looka dis muthuh! Looka heah! Look at dat old floppy thang. Oh, my brothers and sisters, you ain’t got no idea how much trouble a old floppy thang like that can cause.”

I was crazier than ever. I plopped my meat on the table and raised the knife high over my head and shouted, “If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out! If thy hand offend thee, cut it off!”

I stood still as a statue and smiled like a leering ghoul and waited while the tension built. Then I brought the knife down with a horrible crash.

Epilogue

A Final Word From Johnny Lewis

I haven’t seen Travis since I left him on the Mary Walker Bayou. Spending that time with Travis and Cassie was good. It was good to see the life they were living. And it was a relief to find out that his body was still intact — except for the missing fingers.

“Hell no, I didn’t cut my thing off,” he said to me, after I read his journal. “I ain’t that crazy. It was my stupid fingers got in the way. That’s what I cut off. I had no intention of hurting myself. It was all an act, but I was too stoned to pull it off. What’d I tell you happened to my fingers? That a gator got ‘em? Yass! Thass what I always tell the tourists.”

END