Theft: A Love Story

6

The undiluted greens I did not even bother with, but the others I was into like a snouty pig—huge luscious jars, greens so fucking dark, satanic black holes that could suck your heart out of your chest. Green would not be my only colour, but rather my theorem, my argument, my family tree, and soon I had all ten bloody power drills committed in one way or another, mixing my demon dark, with gesso, with safflower oil, kerosene, with cadmium yellow, with red madder; the names are pretty but beside the point—there is no name for either God or light, only mathematics, the angstrom scale, red madder = Aus $65,000.

Hugh was up and away, all over the place like a madwoman's shit, gallumping along the bitumen, swearing at the flies in made-up languages, but he, Dozy, Marlene, my little boy— everyone was dead to me. RIP, so very bloody sorry.

I painted.

Later, when he laid his pale bored eyes upon this canvas in the loft on Mercer Street, the dealer Howard Levi was nice enough to explain what I had done that steaming day in Bellingen: "You are like Kenneth Noland" and "Your words are not the point, your words are an armature, something you hang the colour from."

This was not only dumb, it was not even what he thought. He said—How refreshing. But he thought—Who is this cunt who hasn't heard of Clement fucking Greenberg?

Levi is dead so I can name him. The others I intend to keep quiet about a little longer. These New York dealers had their own particular type of ignorance, quite different from Jean- Paul's, although they did share one astonishing assumption, that I needed to accept what was already agreed upon by Dickberg and others. Jean-Paul would say this almost outright. Levi, on the other hand, found me refreshing.

But it was all the same everywhere: everyone who loved me was trying to get me up to date. Sometimes it seemed there was not a place on earth, no little town with flies crawling inside the baker's shop window, where there was not also some graduate student in a Corbusier bow tie who was now, this instant, reading the party line in Studio International and ARTnews and all of them were in a great sweat to get me up to date, to free me not only from the old-fashioned brushstroke but from any reference to the world itself.

These were weighty issues, but the first question the Manhattan dealers asked me was of a different order: "What are the names and phone numbers of your collectors?"

And the next question would be: "When was your most recent auction sale?"

And then, when they actually looked at the canvas, they would silently ask themselves, What the fuck is this?

All dark and comfortless. They had no eye, only a nose for the market and I smelled to them like some demented Jesus fool living in a cotton town in Bentdick, Mississippi.

But I am Butcher Bones, a thieving cunning man and I made this beautiful seven-foot-high monster with my greens and my Dutch canvas and when it was done, and I had cropped it, the result was twenty-one feet long and its bones, its ribs, vertebrae, wretched broken fingers, were made from light and mathematics.

"I, THE SPEAKER, RULED AS KING OVER ISRAEL IN JERUSALEM; AND IN WISDOM I APPLIED MY MIND TO STUDY AND EXPLORE ALL THAT IS DONE UNDER HEAVEN. IT IS A SORRY BUSINESS THAT GOD HAS GIVEN TO MEN TO BUSY THEMSELVES WITH. I HAVE SEEN ALL THE DEEDS THAT ARE DONE HERE UNDER THE SUN; THEY ARE ALL EMPTINESS AND CHASING THE WIND. WHAT IS CROOKED CANNOT BECOME STRAIGHT; WHAT IS NOT THERE CANNOT BE COUNTED. SO I APPLIED MY MIND TO UNDERSTAND WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE, MADNESS AND FOLLY, AND I CAME TO SEE THAT THIS TOO IS CHASING THE WIND. FOR IN SUCH WISDOM IS MUCH VEXATION, AND THE MORE A MAN KNOWS THE MORE HE HAS TO SUFFER."

And a Mars black pushed itself into that first "I" which stood as tall as my brother in his football socks, and a field of alien goose-turd grey, its surface buffed flat as glass, flowed like an invading army from the "HEAVEN". Forget it. This stuff can't be talked, or walked, or garnered from the auction record. These are my mother's bones, my father's dick, the boiled-down carcass of Butcher Bones, bubbling like a cauldron of tripe, and for the ten days and nights I wrenched and slapped and sanded until, with the flood still running through my head, the canvas put the holy fear of God in me, made the bloody hair on my bloody neck stand up on end, and if it scared me, who was its maker, assassin, congregant, it was going to terrify Jean-Paul who was a form of life more generous, but ultimately even lower, than Howard Levi and the 57th Street Gang.

He had not told me this when he came to fetch me from my prison cell, but I already knew that he and the dealer and the lawyer were concerned that I was going out of style.

Oh dearie me. Gracious, what a disaster. What might I do?

They did not know that I was born out of style, and was still out of style when I came down on the train from Bacchus Marsh. My trousers were too short, my socks were white and I will commit similar sins of style when I am in my coffin, my ligaments all gone, bone by bone, my flesh mixed down with dirt.

Anyway, the problem was not style. It was my falling prices at the auctions and the value of Jean-Paul's collection. The market is a nervous easily panicked beast. And so it should be. After all, how can you know how much to pay when you have no bloody idea of what it's worth? If you pay five million dollars for a Jeff Koons what do you say when you get it home? What do you think?

But what could I do about this, even if I wanted to do something? Nothing more than what I had done already, e. g. suck up to Kev and get some materials on tick. Should I have telephoned Jean-Paul first? Asked his opinion? It is absolutely irrelevant what galleries and critics and people who buy paintings think. Of course I knew who Greenberg was. As far as I can see he was a technician, a radio repairman. He only said one thing worth knowing: the problem with art is the people who buy it.

For a period on the banks of the Never Never I made paintings unlike any I had ever seen or painted before. Day after day, night after night, I terrified myself, hardly knowing what I thought.

And through all of this there was Hugh, and shopping and cooking, and shitting and chopping the thistles, no woman, no drops of lavender sprinkled on her nameless breasts at night.

For every man shall bear his own burden, as our mum would say, and so through all of this was Hugh, and his deep little elephant eyes, every night and morning, through the end of the steamy mouldy summer, until the grass in the front paddock began to fleck with brown like a Harris tweed, and Hugh would still set off into Bellingen with his billy in his hand.

People were kind to him, never said they weren't. City wisdom says these little Australian towns are intolerant, but that was not the case in my experience and I fully expected that a place the size of Bellingen would have its Bachelor Gentleman and its Manly Lady Doctor with steel-tipped boots and serge trousers tough enough to sand your walls. There was room for Slow Bones too, room for everyone in a jostling edgy kind of way.

While I mixed paint, Hugh sat in the Bridge Hotel and made his single beer last from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. I had this all arranged. His chicken-and-lettuce sandwich was delivered to him in his corner, same place each day, beside the radio.

I had no idea I was living in a perfect time. All I saw were irritations: calls from Jean-Paul, my lawyer, and then this long, long silence from Dozy which really did begin to eat my gut. I wanted to see the Leibovitz. It was my right, but I would not call him.

There would always be some crisis.

I thought these upsets were so bloody terrible. Hugh gone missing, Hugh fighting, Hugh distressed, so you can imagine it is a late-summer morning and I am painting and all I can hear are the cockatoos ripping the shit out of the trees above my head, and the cries of magpies, kookaburras, the bull at Mrs. Dyson's, and amongst all this many smaller birds, orioles, honeyeaters, grass wrens, butcher-birds, the sweet rush of the wind in the casuarinas by the river—I can hear a great roaring cry, not a bull calf, but like a bull calf on its way to being a steer, and although I continue painting I know this is my brother coming home—big sloping shoulders, meaty arms, lumbering along the narrow bitumen with his shirt-tails out and the empty billy in his hand and his whiskery face crumpled like a paper bag and that odd Roman nose flowing with snot, and this is why, even when I lived in Paradise, I had no fucking idea of where I was.