The Homeless Millionaire

I woke up just as Fiona zoomed past me in her green Sunbeam, engine snarling.

I kept my eyes closed and lay in bed and wondered why the fuck would I dream of something like that. In my dream, I'd been standing on the pavement outside the Noyce house. I was waiting for Fiona to pick me up, feeling that she wouldn't show. Then her car appeared out of nowhere. It was going at top speed and it disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Of course, this dream had to be caused by what I'd heard from Chaz the previous evening. He told me Fiona had paid him a visit. He said she was pissed off at me in major way. She told him that she'd invited me to her New Year's Eve party and that I'd left halfway through, and subsequently disappeared from the face of Earth. The phone number I'd given her (Robinson & Klein) had been disconnected.

Fiona told Chaz that she'd commissioned me to do a portrait of her father. Her father wanted another one done. It seemed he'd liked my picture well enough to have a copy in the office of one of the companies he'd founded, and owned. He might even want two copies. He'd founded and owned a number of companies.

She was outraged that I'd given her a dud phone number and subsequently failed to remain in touch, forcing her to drive to The Space to ask about me, almost as if this was a guy-leaves-pregnant-girlfriend situation. People she'd invited to her New Year parties were supposed to follow her around, nuzzling her ankle from time to time and looking up with imploring eyes.

Chaz seemed to be really upset about all this. It took me a while to work out that maybe this was because I'd done a deal behind his back, and he didn't get a cut. So I tried to improve things by telling Chaz I'd done the portrait free of charge. It made things worse, much worse.

Chaz exploded.

"You did it for free?" he yelled. "What the fuck is wrong with you? You're a professional artist now. Your show has given you legitimacy. You don't give freebies. Someone likes your work, they write a cheque. That's how it works."

"It was a gift."

That stopped him. He said:

"You mean like a Christmas gift? Or promotional?"

"A bit of both."

"I see," Chaz had said to that, slowly and thoughtfully. "I see."

What he thought he saw was that Fiona and I had something going together. He was wrong. What was more, I was going to make sure Fiona and I wouldn't have anything going together even if the opportunity presented itself.

I made a bad move kissing her at the party. I'd drunk booze and smoked pot and subsequently did something stupid. Nothing special there, everyone did that all the time.

Getting involved with Fiona meant putting a collar around my neck and handing her the leash. There was no way I'd be doing something like that. I'd only just lost my parents' collar. I wasn't going to wear any collars for a while.

Many people did. Sensible people did. There were many benefits from wearing a collar and walking on a leash. Food; a basket or another comfortable place to sleep. The occasional treat, a deliciously sensuous scratch behind the ear.

And from time to time, the leash would be unclipped and you could run around barking wildly and maybe even chase some birds or a cat. But you'd still be wearing the collar around your neck, and sooner or later you'd stop and wait meekly for the leash to be reattached. Sometimes, you'd get a treat in reward.

Fuck that! I wasn't going to let that happen to me. Not in the foreseeable future, anyway.

That thought finally made me motivated enough to get out of bed. I wasn't feeling so hot. Chaz and I had killed that bottle of Vat 69. Chaz and I subsequently went to eat and drink at his favourite place, the restaurant where I'd met him having a gin and tonic breakfast. Then Chaz mailed me home in a cab.

I had to do something about this alcohol business. I was nearing the stage where I wouldn't be able to function properly if I wasn't drunk, the stage when being drunk meant being sober.

I contemplated this important crossroads in my life while drinking coffee and scotch or maybe the other way around, and listening to the battle raging in the room below mine. The two witches were close to scratching each other's eyes out over the copyright to the name Robert. Dave and Birgit didn't intervene; I'd heard noises indicating they were both in the kitchen. They were merrily preparing breakfast while their daughters revved up to kill each other.

Poor Robert Redford! I'd seen him in several movies, and read an interview or two. He really seemed like a nice guy, without any demons lurking in the background. And yet he might have hundreds of suicides and murders on his conscience.

That was where being very good-looking and a genuine nice guy got you. People killed themselves or optionally one another because of you or for you. If you were really unlucky, they killed you.

By the time I'd finished my third coffee and second double scotch and first joint, I was ready to paint something. I wasn't hungry; the enormous meal I'd eaten the previous evening was only halfway through my guts. I just got down to work right away.

I had no idea what to paint, I just wanted to paint. So instead of a central image, I began decorating the edges. I put a tree on the left and a big, multi-twigged bush on the right. Then I started painting a fucking meadow between them. I added a stream in the semi-background and a coniferous forest in the background, on the other bank.

It only needed a stag raising its head to the sky to become the ultimate in kitsch. So I put it in. It was so stupid it made me laugh out loud.

It was the kind of painting you could find renting a room for a holiday stay. It symbolized The Lost Garden of Eden for most people. Here, those paintings seemed to say, are the primeval happiness and peace you've just found by wisely renting this room for your holiday.

It was the same the world over. South of the Equator, the forest was exchanged for jungle or more frequently, a sandy beach with shapely palm trees and maybe a dolphin or sailfish jumping out of the sea in the background. The common denominator was that there weren't any people in the picture. Having people in the picture would fuck it up. It would no longer be kitsch, it would be fucked-up kitsch, and you really couldn't get any worse than that.

So in addition to the stag, I put a couple of very young, five-year-old people inside my painting. The girl was seated under the bush to the right. The guy was seated under the tree to the left. They were both half-profile and they were both crying. The guy was bawling open-mouthed with fists pressed into his eye sockets. The girl's hands were steepled in prayer, the tip of her nose protruding. It was alert and twitching. It was smelling a change in the air.

Those two kids had just discovered how to think, and they didn't like the results that were coming in. They'd bitten into the forbidden apple and had been kicked out of Eden. They'd just thought, for the first time ever, that they'd die one day.

I'd wanted to paint the ultimate in kitsch, and I'd succeeded. It was early afternoon before I was done. The Noyces had all left by then, the two witches apparently undamaged in spite of all the threats hurled earlier: I watched the three of them walk out to the car Dave was waiting in. They seemed a model family, driving into town for a bit of Saturday fun. Happiness had many faces, and some of these were deceptive. You didn't get what you saw.

I went through a long and complicated bathroom routine, clipping my nails and shaving and generally trying to ensure I looked like a fresh corpse instead of something about to fall apart due to decay. Then I got dressed and smoked two cigarettes and had a scotch and went down to the kitchen to call Harry.

He was in and he wasn't sitting on the toilet! He answered the phone! After I'd expressed my amazement and joy, he said:

"Are you doing anything late tonight? Gina's throwing a revenge party."

"What? What's that?"

"The guys living downstairs made our lives hell last night. We've actually had to leave, and sleep at my Mom's place. We're inviting people to come between eleven and midnight, after everyone's gotten drunk someplace else. I got some magic powder to keep everyone going until dawn."

I needed all the magic I could get. I said:

"I'll be there."