The Homeless Millionaire

It took me three more days to finish that fucking Tree of Life and several times I really wished I'd never had the idea.

It would've taken much less time if I'd went with watercolours—a quick dab with the brush for each leaf, and I'd be done. I really wished I had a magnifying glass. There was no question of using an eraser—there were so many fine lines so close to each other that using an eraser could fuck things up beyond repair.

But there was a good side to all those difficulties. They forced me to focus 100% on what I was doing. True, on Tuesday morning I crept up to the front windows at least once per hour to check for Roy Maddon. But I only did that a few times throughout the afternoon, and just a few times again throughout the next day. On Thursday I checked out the street only once, right before I started working.

This was because by then the Tree of Life had pulled me in completely. There was no life without death, and so it became the Tree of Life and Death. Dead leaves and twigs littered the ground around the roots that flared out from the base of its trunk. They'd been pumping water up into the trunk for many, many years, and they were gnarled and twisted from the effort, like the fingers of an old man.

Of course, Life was triumphant. There were many new shoots in the tree's crown. But it was clear that the new shoots were fed by all the dead matter on the ground.

I drew the final line just after one o'clock on Thursday afternoon. My hand hurt like hell. Most of the Johnnie Walker was gone; I'd begun dipping into it Tuesday evening. I'd also smoked a third of the pot I had. I wouldn't have been able to finish the fucking thing otherwise on a single approach. I'd have had to take a break, and return to the Tree of Agony—that's what I'd started calling it in my mind—at a later date.

That would put me in a bind. I was getting together with Chaz on the twenty fourth; I had less than three weeks left. And Chaz was expecting to see at least twenty pictures. I had six, so far.

Of course if every single fucking thing I did was genius I'd easily make that deadline. But I knew it wouldn't happen that way. I'd fuck up many times over the coming weeks. I was bound to have at least a couple of days that would end with tossing the everything I'd done into the trash. And I was bound to have several days when I wouldn't be able to work at all, when it was a given from the start that anything I'd produce was shit.

That left me with two weeks: fourteen days to produce fourteen kickass pictures. I wished to hell I wouldn't have another idea like that fucking tree. It would kill me.

As it was, I had to take a break starting Thursday afternoon for many solid reasons. My hand felt like it required medical attention. I was almost completely out of food, and had a single pack of cigarettes left.

The weather wasn't bad—no rain—so I got dressed, and left the house. It felt as if I were being released from jail. I was already walking down the street when I remembered Roy Maddon and instantly stopped to check things out. He wasn't around, unless he was hiding underground and watching me through a periscope.

I went to the supermarket Tony had told me about, the one that was farther away but had slightly better prices. I needed the walk, and money was a major consideration. I was committed to living on a shoestring budget for the next three months. I'd also have to spend a bundle on art supplies. That fucking tree ate up four pencils, they had to be kept ultra sharp. And I had to drop serious cash on a full set of acrylic paints, too. I'd promised Chaz that I would spend a whole month painting in acrylic.

By the time I got to the supermarket I felt I was fucked. There was no way I had enough money to survive all this shit. I'd have to do something inventive. And it was then that I remembered about the gold medallion in my bag.

I had completely forgotten about it; I'd even forgotten that I owned a stolen Rembrandt. I just hadn't thought about that stuff at all. It seemed as distant as if it had happened years and years earlier, and of little consequence presently.

I did some feverish thinking while I was pushing my shopping cart down various aisles. I was so engrossed that I ventured into the women's lingerie section—the supermarket had a couple of aisles full of clothing for all ages, sexes, and sizes. I drew a frosty stare from an old woman examining pantyhose before I managed to retreat.

I put the medallion firmly out of my mind and concentrated on my shopping. I bought only a week's supply of essentials, and that was assuming I'd smoke no more than thirty cigarettes a day. During my Tree of Life agony, I'd been going through close to fifty. There were painful cutbacks ahead.

Unless, of course, I sold or pawned that medallion. It held a couple of ounces of gold. Of course, it was far more valuable than the gold it was made of. But it was sure to be listed as stolen, and most likely red-flagged on a list that had been circulated to jewellers and pawnbrokers all over the fucking continent.

There was no way around it. If I wanted to get any money from that piece, I'd have to destroy it. Heat it and hit it with a hammer until it was a shapeless mass. It would be worth at least ten times less, but that was the only way I could safely cash in on it. I calculated I should get a couple of hundred bucks, give or take twenty or thirty.

By the time I got back home with my shopping, I'd revised that estimate down to around a hundred and fifty. It was still a lot of money in my present circumstances. Of course destroying a beautiful, antique gold medallion was fucking sacrilege. But sometimes, life required sacrifices. Sometimes you had to destroy something precious and beautiful so that you could carry on.

I went up to my flat and unpacked my shopping and got the coffee maker going and smoked a moody cigarette, looking at James.

"You don’t know how lucky you are, pal," I told him. "You don't need to eat and shit."

James was totally indifferent to what I had to say. I put out my cigarette and decided I'd have a look at that medallion. I distinctly remembered putting it inside a sock and then putting that pair of socks inside the T-shirt bundle with the Rembrandt. That bundle still resided in my travelling bag, which I'd put on the floor of my closet. It was slowly getting filled with my dirty laundry. In fact, the Rembrandt bundle was well hidden by the time I moved to my new flat: I needed to hit a laundromat soon.

It got the bag out of the closet and did some digging and pulled out the bundle with the Rembrandt. When I unwrapped it, the socks weren't there.

I upended the whole bag and embarked on an increasingly frantic search of the pair of socks containing the medallion. It wasn't there! I circled around the pile of clothing I'd made, smoking like a madman. I clearly remembered putting the medallion into the sock, tying that sock into a knot with its partner, and putting the pair inside the T-shirt I wrapped around the Rembrandt. I even remembered that I'd reminded myself to cut my nails as I did that. It was fucking insane!

I went through all my socks again, putting the pairs I'd checked on my bed. Nothing! No gold for Mikey! Out of despair, I started imagining scenarios that were beyond stupid, such as the Noyces sneaking into my room and going through my things and stealing the medallion.

I was midway through another moronic trip like that when suddenly I became aware there was something wrong in the sock display on my bed. I worked it out after two cigarettes. There should have been seven pairs of black socks altogether, dirty or clean. There were only six.

I quickly checked the socks I was wearing that day: they were navy blue. Moving as in a dream, I opened the closet and looked at my footwear. When I was moving house, I'd stuffed a few pairs of socks into my shoes to prevent them from getting squashed and deformed in my bag.

I checked the moccasins first: they were empty. Then I checked my dress shoes, and pulled out a clean pair of black socks, a pair that felt gloriously heavy in my hand.

It was there. It was there! I came close to kissing it and probably would have but for the fact that I was holding it face up, and the pig-tailed guy on the obverse was pretty ugly.

But the medallion in itself was a beautiful piece of work, and I decided I'd try to think about how I could sell it as it was, without destroying it and without inviting any danger. There was no hurry. The whole business could wait a month or even two.

All the same, I spent almost an hour in bed thinking about it before I managed to fall asleep.