For Nikki (3)

For Nikki.
The first time I ever painted I was 4 years old. I used watercolor. I had a pretty damn good set Nik’s. Red, Blue, Green, Brown, I had it all. My Mom wanted me to paint our house. I wanted to paint a cat. I took the black and swirled it around on the cream colored paper; finessing gentle curves, little paws, and scattered whiskers. It was one fucking gorgeous cat. My little Mona Lisa. Mom wanted me to paint a house. I painted the cat. The first time I touched a brush after the coma I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t twist it right, couldn’t contort the fibers on the brush head couldn’t sweep long arcs or dot small specks, I couldn’t feel the serendipitous wood or the artisans etched name on the handle, it’s harder to feel when you don’t have nerve endings in your fingertips. So that first time after the coma I put down the brush and flung my hands into a whole fucking-pool of paint, drenched my whole arms in it, took the plunge, covered myself in Red, and Blue, and Green, and Brown, I looked like a sunset that fought a tree and came up on the losing end. Then I just started hitting the canvass. Smashing color on different corners, sweeping my hands in co centric circles, spiraling outwards to reach the edge of the taut white paper I guess I just wailed on that fucker, just smashed it. I remember coating it like seven or eight times, and in the end it didn’t look like anything but a tortured soul and some broken hands.
I have never equated painting to freedom Nik’s. Are you free if you sling your being onto a canvass to sell to some uptown hipster who just looks at it for a minute, hands in his pockets, swaying back and forth pretending to see the meaning behind the color, nervously twitching his thumbs hoping that the girls he wants to fuck with are looking at his countenance, a twisted intrigued face, so that they think he’s deep, so that they think he has some genes worth spreading, so that he can maybe stop coming to these fucking art gallery’s every Saturday night. Is it free if you have to serve coffee to that exact some fucker the very next morning after he somehow managed to fuck that girl who is now sitting right across from him, eating a strawberry Danish, laughing at his shit jokes while he keeps telling them hoping that she’ll just leave and forget all about him and his needle dick. Tell me Nik’s is it free if you eat off welfare, scrape the fucking peanut butter out of jars at work, then blow all your money on paint, hoping that maybe this art thing will catch on eventually. No Nik’s, painting isn’t freedom, it is a cage, and I am fucking trapped in it.
Have you seen any of my artwork Nik’s? I suppose not, I’m not particularly famous, yet. Most of the time I start by staring at the canvass for a while, visualizing the feeling I want to recreate. But once, I decided I wanted mountains. Big, fuck-off huge mountains. Cascades, Rockies, Himalayas, every range you can think off. So I dipped in the red, and made huge points, protruding into and above the paper, giant’s peaks. Then I dipped in black, and orange and kept layering the peaks, saturating the canvass with the majesty of the range. But as I kept painting, I started to look at my mountains and I saw a face. I saw the sad drawn out features of an old man, the sunken eyes, and drooping cheeks. The floppy wrinkles and elongated chin of a despondent old, old, man. I saw the tired, coal colored eyes of a miner who dug too deep and blew the tunnel. I saw the broken, displaced, sharp tinted eyebrows of a man who has felt too much pain in too little time. I saw my father, balding, bawling, dying slowly in my care. I looked up at the ceiling, and saw the sky, and saw the red windbreaker blowing softly in the frigid air. Clouds look colder in the winter Nikki, and tears freeze faster in my apartment when I close the shade. In a moment of lucidity I stared at the portrait, fell backwards and cried as my father did when he stared at me serenely slipping into my coma. Nikki I have never painted a landscape, I have only painted me.
Someday Nikki, maybe I will come out west. Travel the lakes in streams of America, put some trust in God and hope a train out there. If I’m lucky I might wake up on one of those ecclesiastical mornings. But Nikki, the tortured artist sells the paintings, and makes the money. The commercial ones have their own T.V. shows. You know me; I’m no good for T.V. Your dog sounds nice, Nikki. Sounds like my kind of dog, fucking up in the oddest ways. Nikki, I can’t breath the air here, how is it out there?