The Homeless Millionaire

The next day began by looking as if it might be even worse. It was a Saturday, and the Noyces occupied the bathroom until well after ten o'clock. I spent over an hour waiting for them to be done, sitting and smoking and drinking coffee and discovering my mind was even emptier than the day before.

Getting any work done was going to be hell. I contemplated smoking a joint but I had very little pot left, and I wasn't sure it wouldn't make things even worse.

What was more, my paranoid pal was missing. He loved situations like that: he could go on and on and I would sit in guilty silence, getting the shit kicked out of me. Why wasn't he taking advantage of this golden opportunity to put the boot in?

The answer came to me when I was finally taking my shower. My pal was a drinker, like me. With no booze around, my company just wasn't attractive enough.

I had a go at painting my pal right after the standard breakfast. I remembered he'd been offended by all the grey and green and black in his previous portrait. So I painted my pal relaxing in a deck chair at the poolside, wearing black swimming trunks and black sunglasses and a beatific smile.

I even gave him a fucking drink complete with one of those little umbrellas. It was standing on a little side table next to the deck chair. His hand was lying on the table next to the glass, totally relaxed. It was all a little too perfect so I put a bit of black dirt behind his thumbnail. But it was nice dirt, he probably acquired it while scraping a chunk of hash to roll a joint.

There were a couple of cool chicks in bikinis in the background. One of them was making a comment about my pal to her friend: her eyes were on him as she spoke. After some consideration, I gave my pal a bigger bulge in his swimming trunks. They were black so it was still subtle but it made extra clear here was a guy ready to fuck the world.

I made the time close to noon because I didn't want to endlessly fuck around with the shadows. The few places where a shadow fell over an object were enough grief. Getting it right involved placing a fine dark mist that didn't obscure any contours. The shadow's shape had to change with the shape of the object, too—a little stretched over here, a little shrunk over there.

It was fucking insane. If I'd set the time for that scene as the middle of the afternoon, it would've easily added a couple of hours of boring and difficult work. As it was, it was beginning to get dark by the time I was done with that painting.

It came out fucking good. It told a multitude of stories, and it looked great. I got the colours exactly right and the shadows almost exactly right—I cut some corners there, but no one would ever know except myself or maybe Chaz when high on perception-enhancing drugs. But there was also something seriously wrong with this picture. It sent out a different vibe from the one I'd wanted.

I stopped looking at it and went to smoke a cigarette by the front window. Dusk was about to turn into night. The street lamps had already been turned on. They cast pale pools of light on the street that glistened with water. The puddles that had formed were being pockmarked by fresh raindrops.

I decided I'd paint a rain puddle next. It would be a daytime puddle, its surface reflecting the scenery while hit by fresh raindrops just like the puddle I was looking at. But I had to abandon that idea almost instantly, because if I showed rain falling the light would have to be grey, more or less, and I didn't want to paint grey. So I settled on a puddle on one of those brilliant sunsets that sometimes occur after a rainfall. No fucking around with the raindrops also meant less work.

Of course, there had to be at least one actor present. I chose a beetle. It had just managed to crawl out of the water after a lengthy struggle, narrowly escaping death by drowning. It would be attempting to spread its wings, glued by the film of water. Maybe I could include the shadow of a bird swooping down to eat that beetle. It would have to be really subtle.

I was really bucked by that idea and felt like getting going on it right away but truth was, I was simply physically incapable of doing any more work that day. My right forearm and hand hurt so bad I was actually smoking with my left hand. Doing high precision work with a paintbrush involved a lot of muscle tension, and doing those shadows fucking killed me even though I'd kept them to a minimum.

So I spent the rest of the evening very pleasantly, walking around my room while smoking cigarettes and envisioning the puddle that I would paint next. It was as good as having sex, or better. I'd been totally blocked and now that stuff was finally pouring through I felt ecstatic.

By the time I went to bed, I'd decided I'd set the season to the fall. There would be a couple of fallen leaves around, maybe even several. The leaf drowning in the puddle could be brown turning on black; the leaf that landed on dry ground could exhibit the whole range of autumn colours, yellow and orange and red. And there were all those different leaf shapes to choose from. Of course there would be a maple leaf too, I was a Canadian after all.

I was thinking about that stuff practically from the moment I woke up the next morning. I was really excited about it. There were so many things I could choose to put into that reflection on the puddle's surface.

I was feeling extra happy because all that stuff was happening while I was completely straight, without any assistance from drugs or alcohol. Being creative with the help of booze and drugs carried a sort of stigma; it implied my brain wasn't good enough to produce stuff without assistance. Everyone felt like a genius when they got high. There was no shortage of geniuses on drugs.

You wanted real proof of your ability? You did it straight, without assistance of any kind. Sure, it could've turned out a little better with a little bit of this and maybe a little bit of that. But it was the ability to do it straight that mattered. The ability to do it anywhere, anytime.

I was so high on my ability to create good art while sober that I actually tried to sing in the shower. It was a mistake. It reminded me that I definitely couldn’t sing, no matter how well I painted. It spoiled my mood because for I while I felt I could do fucking anything I wanted. It was a very common misconception, and it knocked me off my pedestal.

People everywhere were constantly falling into shit because they thought they could do something they couldn't. And when they failed, they usually produced an endless stream of explanations of why they failed for totally arbitrary and independent reasons. None of them had anything to do with their ability to do the job. They were more than qualified and talented to do the job. They couldn't be blamed for their failure.

I was determined to never become of those assholes. In fact, I liked to think it was good if something went wrong because of me. If it was my fault, I could fix it. If it was someone else's, I couldn't.

By the time I returned to my room, I was slightly depressed by my inability to sing. This clearly was one thing that couldn't be fixed. Maybe it was this frame of mind that influenced me when I looked at the painting I'd made the previous day. Whatever.

The moment I looked at it—the first time that day—I instantly knew what its bad vibe was about. My painting reeked of evil.

The guy relaxing in the deckchair, my closest pal, had spent the previous day shooting people and torturing them to death; he was just having a breather before returning to work. He, or maybe his dad, could be a major drug baron; the chicks in the background were either hired whores or women who whored themselves. It was clear from the way they stood. The way people put their feet on the ground always told a lot.

The black dirt under my pal's thumbnail wasn't hash; it was dried blood. He hadn't washed his hands properly. He didn't look the type to use surgical gloves when cutting up people. They'd interfere with his enjoyment. He was a guy that didn't like using rubbers.

Chaz would love it. People were entertained by cruelty and pain when it didn't affect them personally. When I was living in England, I came across this book about medieval life. They had no TV, no cinemas, no horror movies back then. So they went the live theatre route. Public executions were a real hit—the more cruel, the better. Watching someone's guts being ripped out while they were still alive—man, people would travel for days just to get a glimpse of that.

But sometimes everyone was behaving themselves, and there was a shortage of executions. When that happened, people amused themselves in other ways. One favourite was to slowly lower a net full of cats onto a blazing fire. I remembered reading about a French king watching that and laughing so hard he had tears coming out of his eyes. At least that was what the chronicler of that event wrote. I could sense he approved; he was making the point that the burghers of a town had provided the king with excellent entertainment, and this was one of the acts he'd listed to prove his point.

Yes, people would enjoy the cruel vibe my painting gave off. I didn't enjoy it, though. I couldn't have painted that without being like that, somewhere deep inside. Well, I was human too. What a pity.

I spent the whole Sunday working on the puddle painting, and it still wasn't finished by the evening. This was because I got too ambitious and tried to squeeze a whole fucking encyclopaedia into the reflections on the water. Each extra thing decreased the importance of what was already there and I ended up with a bowl of fucking vegetable soup. I just smothered the original idea with all those ornaments.

I gave up on it, deciding to have another go the next day: it was a kickass concept and I was determined to get it right.

The bottom line for that whole weekend was poor: one good painting that made me feel bad. When I was getting into bed, I had the thought all that cruelty could be blamed on the fact that I painted it sober. That painting would have turned out very differently with Johnnie Walker around.

Basically, being sober pissed me off and made me cruel. I had the feeling it worked that way for plenty of other people, too. It definitely worked that way for my parents. As I'd mentioned earlier, the only times I ever saw them having a good time was when they were pouring booze down their throats.

I was very determined to pour some down my throat too, as soon as I had the money needed.. That was the promise I made to myself right before I fell asleep.