EVERYTHING MUST GO

The most compelling story is the truth.

I throw open the heavy industrial doors and hundreds of people are milling about. They are eager. You can smell it.

The annual art walk at The Brewery has jumped off, and I am in the middle of it. The Brewery used to be just that—a manufacturing and distribution hub for Pabst, long closed. You can see the faded logo on the way in, off Avenue 26th, a vein cutting through a most beastly part of town—just down the way from Philippe’s and their legendary French dip sandwich. The Brewery is now a collection of old industrial buildings, mostly concrete bunkers that have been converted into live-work spaces.  Kind of cool.  Mostly artists, architects, graphic designers, you know—dropouts who still appreciate a payday—that kind of vibe.  I live in a three-level space with the humming I5 freeway in the background. Everything is coated in a black, gritty film. My place is big, especially by LA standards, about 2,200 square feet, and cheap, too.  I pay $1850 a month to ingest carcinogens from the never-ending bumper-to-bumper mayhem.  I rent from an old Russian couple, nice people, who used my place as an art gallery.  Not enough foot traffic, though, so they took an upscale spot in Pasadena, near where I work now. I stop in every once in a while and shoot the shit with the old man.  His son, Vlad, lives next door to me. He’s an out-of-work mime but we never speak of it.

Everybody loves a story, Jacob would tell me over and over. It’s as much about the story behind the art, as the art itself. And then I’d watch him send some hipster couple from Hancock Park home with a knock-off 18th century Louis XV chamber pot. They, in the most literal sense, bought something that used to hold shit.

I sold my first artwork at the art walk.

 I had dabbled with painting a bit, mostly self-taught, abstract kind of stuff.  I do a fair Pollack impersonation—close enough, but you can only capture the inner crazy if you are that crazy.  Anyway, all the residents of the Brewery can participate in the art walk, so I hang a bunch of paintings and roll up the double doors and people start streaming in.  Remember, this is also my house, so these fucks are traipsing through my living room.  I can hear comments about my taste in furniture and my art as if I am not standing there.  Fuck you, I’m thinking, but then someone taps me on the shoulder and asks if I’m the artist.  I still laugh a little just thinking about it. 

Artist?  Sure, yes, I say, that’s me.  I. Am. The. Artist.

This exquisite young woman tells me how much she loves that piece in the corner—a collage of paper and ink, and acrylic—mostly a sea of brown tones, kind of dark, I guess, but that’s what usually leaks out of my brush.  I tell her a little about myself and then it clicks, she wants my story, she wants to be sold.  So, I weigh in.  I tell her about growing up in upstate New York, about spring and the mud and the need to feel hope amongst overpowering gloom, like when the first bud of spring pokes its head through a shitty brown and ashen blanket, only to find capillary purple skies and a faded piss-yellow sun. I tell her I trudged through that landscape day after day, year after year, as a kid.  She needs to look closely, though, maybe even squint.  No, harder than that, I tell her, gently resting a hand on her shoulder, thinking I’d rather sleep with her than sell her this painting.  And she is squinting, actually squinting, and she says she can see…it.  A nearly imperceptible pin head of light, nearly translucent green, the most tender hue ever inadvertently splattered on a canvas.  Fucking Van Gogh could not hold my jock.  The first guy ever to scrape images into a bleak, gray cave wall wished he had done that.

She saw it and she bought it.  Just like that. She wrote me a check for $400 and carried that fucking canvas out the front door. 

I never saw her again. But she was happy when she left. She no doubt went home and hung that painting on the wall—hung me on her wall—and told my story (our story, now) to anyone who would listen.

I don’t paint much anymore.  But I am a more honest salesman.

Fiction is too easy, I thought, as I watched her disappear into the undulating throng, hugging that painting for dear life.

No more lies.