The Deep Whatsis. Peter Mattei
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the truth but it means I must have another reason for being here and that one I don’t want to divulge.
“Isn’t he in Prague?” I say, splitting the difference.
“He was supposed to leave last night but his flight got canceled can you believe that it was a nightmare he’s leaving in an hour do you want to see him I can maybe squeeze you in just kidding.” I’m staring at Clown, who’s in full ’80s mode today, parachute pants and one of those Palestinian scarves and a Members Only warm-up jacket, and I’m wondering what his getup is, does he put on a big pink wig and a red nose and paint his face white, or does he know he already looks enough like a clown to make a sick child laugh? Just then Tom’s voice is heard from inside his office.
“Eric!” he is yelling. “Eric you douchebag come in here don’t go away I need to talk to you before my car comes!” I go into Tom’s office. He is sitting amid a pile of DVD reels that is almost as large as he is, which is considerable.
“Yo, asshole,” I greet him, closing the door, “why aren’t you getting your knob sucked by a Czech hooker right now?” This is how Tom and I talk to each other; the day I learned that I would have to terminate him in Q2 of the next fiscal I considered not being so buddy-buddy with him, then I changed my mind. “Close the door,” he says, even though I already have. He tosses a DVD of work from an animation company called Phawg into the trash basket and takes his earphones off. “Did you say something?”
“No,” I say. The sounds of a live Rush concert are coming from his iPhone. Rush is Tom’s favorite band; he turns off the trollish sounds and looks up at me.
“I can’t believe you fucked her,” he says.
“Fucked who, your wife?” I say. “Ha ha just kidding, in case you were wondering.”
“Funny,” he says. “I’m talking about that very hot girl we just hired.”
“First of all, she may be funny and smart and all but she’s insane,” I inform him, “so you might want to stay away from her entirely, or find a way to fire her before I do. And second of all, I didn’t have sex with her.”
“Which is not what she’s telling everyone.”
“Oh bullshit she’s a drug addict,” I say.
“So are you,” he says.
“Have a nice trip, dickhead,” I say to him as I open the door and head out, turning back to ask him what he’s doing with the DVD cases. He says he doesn’t know he just felt like saving them.
“See you in lala,” he is saying as I leave.
“What?”
“I’m flying directly from Prague to LA for the FreshIt thing. I’ll be there for callbacks.”
“Cool,” I say, “that’s awesome, but I’m not going to that shoot.”
“No?” he says. “I thought you were.”
“Why would I waste my time with that shit?” I say.
“Because the account is in trouble.”
“Not my problem,” I say. Then as I am closing his door he says, “By the way, she’s uploading some spots to the FTP, I’d try the dub room. I mean, assuming you want to find her.”
“I don’t, actually,” I lie. “I want her out of here by EOD.”
“Right,” he says. “Will do.”
I walk out of his office and down the hall I hadn’t walked down before, hoping for a random encounter rather than having to actually set foot in the dub room which would be too obvious. I end up circling the floor two times but I don’t see her. I probably would have kept doing it all afternoon except my phone rings and it’s Seth Krallman, my old friend whom I hate.
“What up, gangsta?” I say into my phone as I head toward the elevator. “Why’d you stand me up the other night, dog?” One of the reasons I hate Seth Krallman is because he talks like he’s from the ghetto when actually he is from Greenwich, Connecticut, and I tend to talk that way when I’m with him just to mask the fact I dislike him so intensely. I’ve hated Seth Krallman ever since he got clean and became a yoga teacher and changed his name to Hanuman or Ganesh or something. No, the truth is I always hated him; we shared a big house together at Brown and he thinks this means we have some kind of Special Bond. He’s a pretentious idiot, a so-called avant garde playwright who had twelve or thirteen seconds of notoriety in the East Village in the late ’90s when he chained himself to the stage of a tiny theater for a month as some kind of protest slash performance, peeing in a crystal bowl and mixing it with champagne and drinking it every night at precisely midnight, while reciting some poetry. I avoided him for years but he friended me recently and keeps wanting us to hang out, I’m pretty sure that he’s gearing up to ask me for a job. He comes from a rich family, as I alluded, but his father invested badly and lost most everything in ’08 so Seth’s monthly automatic deposit has dwindled away—he has to work now to pay his rent and his medical bills, because he is bipolar, and without his meds and his therapy the man is useless. So he wants to invite me to this really cool opening and after-party in the ’wick and maybe, I’m guessing, that’s when he’ll ask me if I can help him get into advertising. I have nothing to do tonight and need to take my mind off myself and maybe talk to people so I say yes. Then I immediately regret it but he doesn’t know that yet. So he starts to ask me how work is going and I pretend that the elevator is killing my reception even though I am not in the elevator.
1.8
I get to the opening before Seth does. It’s at a storefront gallery on an industrial section of Johnson Avenue; the space used to be a skateboard shop and now it’s rented out by the three guys who started Rodney magazine, and they show art in it. Rodney is considered the epicenter of cool in Bushwick right now and since Bushwick is the epicenter of cool in New York that makes Rodney the most boring thing on the planet. Normally the thought of the Fucking Rodney Scene would send me into an uncontrollable rage and thus I would avoid it entirely, but I am here to see the hateful ex-junkie yoga master and hang out with him and listen to him go on about how avant garde theater is dead, seriously, it’s a tragedy, I mean Heiner Müller wouldn’t even get his work seen today. His shtick is really one of the saddest things ever and maybe that’s why he cheers me up so easily.
The art space is packed and the kids are spreading out into the street like a fungus. Never before have I seen so many people in one place who are exactly the same: the same age, the same race, the same wardrobe, the same facial hair, the same taste in music, socioeconomic background, college experience, shoes, political beliefs, and hair; but I suppose what really unites them is the shared fantasy that they are rebels, subversively unique individuals creating their own style for themselves.
I make a quick spin through the crowd and can’t find Vishnu. He’s always late anyway, it’s one of the many things I can’t stand about him. I squeeze inside the storefront past a girl wearing a Shepard Fairey Obama Hope T-shirt in which she’s sliced his eyes out, showing her nipples through his empty eye sockets, and I can’t tell if she means this ironically or if she means anything by it at all, maybe her nipples doubling as the POTUS’s eyes is just a coincidence. I then get it, I make a connection to the concept behind the art show, which is called “Show Us Your Tits!” and it features lots of photos (taken, it seems, by anyone who can push the button on a camera) of girls flashing their breasts in bars, at parties, on the street, and so on, the pinnacle of art world cool reappropriating bad TV from over a decade ago, and with unicorns.
All in all it’s a pretty good show. A lot of the pictures are so lo-res they look like they were screen-grabbed off YouTube or at best shot on old phones. The whole thing must have taken at least an entire Saturday to curate and hang, affixed to the wall as it all is with duct tape; perhaps it took the whole weekend if there was any marijuana in play. The truth is I’ve never liked art very much, and I can’t decide if I like this