Scumbler. William Wharton
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wife, to give me a push up, just to get going, moving.
I’m scumbling, stippling around, in and out courtyards, all crowded with wooden sheds and shacks. They’re piled tight, holding each other up. I’m ass deep in broken windows, old wet mattresses, sacks and boxes of garbage – everything smelling of mold. Rats are playing in the garbage. I’m feeling at home, in my natural place, delayed decay, festering under gray Paris skies.
There’s a marble workshop in back of a court, beautiful pieces of cut marble, sliced like cheese for tabletops to make French-ugly-type furniture.
On top of the other smells is cut-wood smell, sawdust, greased tools. This is a furniture-making part of town, gradually going downhill, out of business. Factories are making modern, glue-together furniture – cheap, throwaway stuff, nobody gets bored. Change your furniture with your husbands, wives; hard come, easy go; the new life.
I stop and get talking with a great older guy – older than me, even. He’s wearing a gray denim cap and could pass for Khrushchev, the Soviet shoe banger. He’s built like a four-poster fire plug. I wrestle the motorcycle onto its stand and follow him into his shop. He has a mattress business, makes mattresses from the wire up. I love seeing this kind of thing, helps me enjoy sleeping in a bed.
He comes on with an exciting, long story. I can sit all day listening to a good storyteller.
Sixty years ago he jumped ship; was in the Russian Navy. He winds up in Paris alone, nineteen years old and a Jew. Fat chance.
He starts calling himself Sasha, can hardly remember his real name anymore. During WW II, he hid from the Nazi Jew hunters, French and German, in these very buildings. He grabs me by the arm and hustles me down a tunnel and hole he’s dug into the ground under his garage.
There’s a whole room carved out down there; stocked with food, rice, beans, canned food, even candles.
Sasha and I could be soul mates. He invites me to lunch with him in back of his shop: cold borscht, bread, runny cheese, warm wine.
We talk on and on for hours. He tells how he started his spring-and-mattress business, one-man operation, never hired anybody. He found himself a nice Jewish French girl, got married, had three kids; lived on top of this mattress shop thirty years.
Now the kids are grown up, have a furniture store on the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. They’re ashamed of Sasha, don’t want him around their fancy store; he’s too fat, too dirty, too old, smelly, too Russian, too Jewish.
WE OUTLIVE OURSELVES, BECOME TRASH,
OBSTACLES, UNWANTED, UNWANTED EVEN BY
THOSE WE LOVE, WHO LOVE US, TOO.
Last year Sasha’s wife died of cancer. His eyes fill up telling me about it, whips out a greasy blue handkerchief and wipes tears away without slowing down. He tucks the handkerchief in his back pocket, looks me in the eye and tells how he has a lady friend now.
He smiles, I smile back. He says when a man has lived with a woman for fifty years he can’t live without one. He’s telling me?
Men are only parking spaces for women to fill. A man without a woman is a house without windows. God, I hate to think what I’d do if Kate died. It’d sure take most of the fun out of life; not all, but a big part of my reasons for living.
TO SEE IN SOMEONE ELSE’S EYES
THE CENTER OF YOUR OWN AND FEEL
LIFTED, SHUTTERING FROM THE GROUND
The wild part is this woman friend is forty years younger than Sasha. He’s proud as a rooster. His kids are going crazy, afraid he’ll give her his money. His woman friend is an Arab widow; he keeps her in an apartment near the mattress shop; he’s thinking of moving in with her.
Sasha laughs; says he’s had everything else in life, so what if he has shit for kids.
No sense me explaining the regression to the mean, so I don’t; too complicated; nobody wants to admit it anyway.
I tell him he should have more kids with the new woman, Middle Eastern peace right here in Paris, handmade. To hell with the old kids; make new ones; maybe they’ll be more real, like him. He gives me a punch on the arm, a hard punch. You know, that’s about the closest men come to showing love for each other, giving and taking punches. That’s weird.
I LIE HERE WEEPING IN MY WIRE
SPIDER’S LAIR; DRY MOTES FLOAT
FREELY IN INSECTLESS AIR.
I ask Sasha if I can paint him. Sasha handles it in stride; wants to know how long it’ll take. I knock this painting out in an hour and a half; get a good one. I do it size 20F, about eighteen inches by two feet. I do head, shoulders, full face; great head, pig eyes, putty nose. When I’m finished, I try giving it to him.
‘What for?’
‘Give it to your kids, make them suffer!’
Also I want to pay him back for his story, his life.
Sasha punches me again, tough, thick, ham hands. He hangs his painting on the wall between some brass springs, tells me to follow him.
He waddles along ahead of me and we go farther back up the alley. There’s a three-story wooden building there. It leans out in every direction, has a tar-paper roof. It’s half full of old furniture, mostly waterfall design, nineteen-twenties stuff. Everything’s dirty as hell, inch-thick dust, caked and oily. Sasha says I can have any furniture I want; all this taken in on trade years ago.
I’m excited by the building; ask if he’ll rent it to me. Sasha laughs. I tell him I’ll turn it into a studio, have naked women in to pose. Sasha laughs louder, says wind blows through, cats crap all over, holler and fuck at night; rats eat cats’ kittens, pigeons fly in through the roof. I tell him I’ll feed the pigeons, train my rats to fight his cats.
FLOATING, FALLING: NOTHING UP
PEERING BLINDLY THROUGH SNOW.
MY IGNORANCE, SKETCHING ARROGANCE.
THE FINAL SCOPE OF INNOCENCE.
We make a deal right there; no papers. I pay six hundred francs every three months; that’s about forty bucks a month. I promise I’ll paint a portrait of his wife from a tiny photo. It’s the only picture he has of her, one of those five-and-dime automat photos.
A FACE AS STILL LIFE
BUT STILL LIFE LEFT.
I get in there and clean things up. This is grim corruption. I haul most of the furniture up into the attic; chop the worst, stack it up for firewood.
First I put in big beams so the whole place won’t fall down on me with a strong wind; then I cut a hole through the roof to let in light. I put plastic panels in this hole and line underneath with thin-roll plastic for insulation. I cover all the walls and ceiling with Styrofoam panels and paint the floors white.
Sasha lets me tie in to his electric line; I’ll pay a set amount every month. Then I buy two potbelly stoves at the flea market, put in long pipes to radiate the heat. I haul back down some of the furniture and spread it around. The place is light, great, looks like something between a cheap whorehouse and a surgical theater.
ANOTHER NEST, NOT MY BEST
YET MEETS THE FINAL TEST.
The first thing I do there is paint the portrait of Sasha’s wife. I let myself drift, float into it, hardly looking at the photo. I’m painting her as Sasha described her to me, the way he felt about her, her soul.
A FACE I DON’T KNOW, A MIND ECHOING ME.
I’M INFUSED WITH ANOTHER. MOTHER, SISTER, BROTHER.
I do this in an afternoon. Sasha says the painting looks more like his wife than the photo. He cries.
I’m a bit psychic; it’s a nick of woman in me, I think. I might be part male witch. I’ve met two true witches in my life so far: