What Beauty Read online

CHAPTER 5

  Peter N is black. I point this out for two reasons. One, I don’t like living life as if it were a David O. Selznik production; two, Who ever heard of living in a city without having some friends that don’t share your skin color? This is the subtle difference of the human comedy, as practiced in America, that appeals to me.

  After Peter got noticed in NYC for his artwork, and just before finding regional fame with his steel-cast “DownTown” sculptures, he lopped off all but the first letter of his last name. The change was made for good reason. Peter shares a name with a hugely famous cum-shot king. That other North had found celebrity and riches for his statuesque erections, and a certain notoriety for performing in sex scenes with an underage anal queen. Not quite the two-peas-in-a-pod story we want to know about, but at the junction between modern life and Cable-TV news, we all must make do.

  Peter’s home studio is in Alphabet City, at Avenue D and 12th Street. By the time I’ve walked across town to the old tenement building, sweat has beaded on my brow and is dripping from my temples. What I must resemble now (after dog walking, Henry & The Dick, kneeling in wet turf) is a horrible joke, because this grime and mud and the odor rising off me is what I cringed from when I had followed Karen K. I use a hand to mop my forehead, tossing the sweat into the gutter as I round the corner and stop before ascending his porch steps. Pete owns the basement and first floor in the corner of this brown brick monstrosity.

  The basement windows are frosted. Lamplight shows bluish behind the glass. In the upstairs windows I see the curtains have been thrown wide, but lack symmetry: in the left frame a white panel has been pulled to the edge, while its sister bisects a paint-splattered pane; the right frame shows the panels held open by white rope sashes, pregnant bellies sagging towards the center. I ring the bell twice, wait, then twice more.

  Peter N’s name change brought quick jokes from friends; accusations of not “living up to size” was a favorite, and quickly overused to boredom and even self-mockery, because how many people have a twelve-inch cock? Peter N’s critics flung harsh denouncements, however, claiming the change was “pretentious” and playing to the Hip-Hop fashion of the new-style MTV crowd. “As if they bought art,” Pete laughed. This criticism brought on a counter charge (not from Peter) of racism. He asked his art friends what protocol he should follow. I counseled a lie-low approach, to stand above the critics. The consensus was that he would look better if he let the press talk themselves to tears while he rode the free marketing wave, and all the jealousy would collapse on itself.

  A minute goes by with no movement behind the door. I press the bell again, and look down the street. The few people in sight hold plastic grocery bags, sagging backpacks slung over one shoulder, or attachés. All mind their own business. I notice a gray-sheet tabloid newspaper, flattened on the sidewalk, its edges fluttering in the face of a wind jet. Then the paper begins to unfold, fluidly at first, until the fat innards catch the wind and change to galleon sails. The wind doubles and quickly pulls apart the billowed broadsheets, carrying them into the air, fluttering like runaway kites, some rising quickly, with a few turning over and over. Down the street they all go, airborne, comically, and one sheet wraps around a man’s head from behind. He reaches up and tears it away, and watches the other sheets settle to the ground as the breeze lightens, then stops. He crumbles the paper in his hand, and tosses it at the base of a nearby tree before resuming his pace. The air smells of onions, its source unknown.

  A rustle behind the door snatches back my attention. The door begins to rattle as three locks get sprung, and swings back to reveal Peter’s head in the space, though sticking sideways and far higher than I anticipate a head should be. Headphones dangle from his neck, out of which techno beats bite the air with needle-prick intensity.

  “Minus Orth!”

  “Peter N! What’s going on inside there?”

  “Wendy likes purple,” he says. “I’m an obliging boyfriend, so –”

  The door arcs wide and he shows me a house painter’s brush sticking up in his right hand like a flaming torch. Some kind of plum shade shines on its bristles. I see that he’s standing on a ladder. The brush reminds me of a mean French tickler I once saw in the display case of an Uptown S&M shop. The paint tint is more blue-black than reddish purple; the tongue of a chow, a giraffe, a Bactrian camel.

  “You know I hate white,” he reminds me.

  “You’re referring to paint, I hope.”

  I squeeze through the space between the door, Peter, and the ladder that’s taking up most of the foyer. He holds the brush high as I duck inside. The door closes behind me, and I’m standing in yellow-blue light as cheery as any country kitchen, lit by four bare bulbs in a chandelier stripped down for cleaning. The latex paint odor is powerful here.

  “Lord-ee, Minus. You’re late. And what’s happened to you? Did you sleep on the street last night?”

  The run through the park has dried only the frayed cuffs on my jeans, and my knees and shins are still wet through. I’d scraped my sneaker soles of mud, which now I kick off onto a mat inside the hallway leading to the back of the apartment.

  “I was taking some photos and, you know, had to make some sketches, also. There was this really neat pair of sunglasses, throw-aways, or, maybe a fight. I couldn’t disturb them, so I had to get low.”

  “Sort’a like kneeling in the urinals at Grand Central,” Peter says.

  “That would be a rude comment at another time,” I tell him, “but right now I know what you mean.” I glimpse myself in Peter’s mirror, hanging between two coat racks mounted on the wall. There’s an awful suggestion in my appearance. Peter shakes his head and laughs, waving that brush demonically at me. He climbs down from his four-step ladder and says, “Hey, did you bring lunch?”

  He’s joking, of course, and tells me that he wants to finish up the foyer before we get started on the lighting. He sends me downstairs as he retakes the highest ladder rung, bucket in hand and pulling his headphones over his ears. By the time the pads are in place, the side of each earphone is streaked purple, while his shaved head shines with polka dots, like some rare rainforest tree frog. When he slaps that monster brush against his thigh to the music’s thumping beat, I sidestep the splatter and flee into the narrow stairway.

  Its darkness takes away my sight for a moment, only to be readjusted, when I walk into the studio, by primary and secondary colors slashing across the room in broad strokes. The space is naturally lit by street-side windows. I find two stools in the middle of the room along with an easel the size of which rivals the cross at Golgotha. One seat is for the artist, the other his model. Over this centerpiece hang Peter’s photo floods and reflectors, a home-designed rack that, when lit, illuminates the studio to perfect northern-light diffusion. It’s a tradition most artists still follow.

  Canvases stand against three walls, stacked twenty deep in careful rows. Each is a five-by-five square, Peter’s preferred picture size. These semi-completed canvases start at the far corner and go to the street-side wall, along which the frosted windows run end to end. A double washbasin takes up one corner. It’s a battered, steel object so heavy it could serve duty as a bomb shelter (I helped Peter drag it down that dark stairway). Its industrial-grade spray nozzle hangs from an extended pipe like some lethal swamp snake.

  I hear voices that lure me to the windows, feeling the cold cement penetrate my stocking feet. I look up at the frosted panes; no shadows loom outside on the sidewalk. I wonder at the sound. Peter has built pinewood utility shelves beneath the windows, stacked higgledy-piggledy with brushes, cans, glass palates, and hundreds of paint tubes. It’s Baum’s Munchkinland, after Dorothy has opened the door of her black-and-white farmhouse. The voices break across the room again. Still the windows are uniformly milky. Then the sound’s source becomes clear: Peter is singing to himself upstairs. The voice is a low chant, a chorus sung in a loop, almost a mantra. The sound moves overhead, across the floor, becomes faint until, su
ddenly, I hear it in the stairwell. Peter’s footsteps are soft toe-plants on the wood runners, not the heel drops of a construction worker. Suddenly, he bursts through the gray shadows, sees me staring, and stops his singing.

  “Keep busy, Minus, will ya? I have a few things to find before I forget about them, which’ll get me angry at myself later for not doing what I need to do now.”

  He passes me with a focused stare and turns on the power nozzle over the sink. I meander to the canvases beside the stairwell door. Since I’ve been given the okay, I flip through the paintings, and after a moment pick out four canvases from their stacks and place them across the back wall. Two of his paintings reveal visceral colors. Visceral, as in red meat diet, a bit of white gristle inside nicely charred fat, and shiny wet blood from a fresh cut down the center. I’m describing the imagery, not the scenes on the paintings. Behind me, Peter rummages through his paint cans and tubes.

  I take two of the paintings and stand them on top of the stacks, so they are at eye level, more or less. I cover the bottom row of paintings with a drape cloth so my focus stays paired to the chosen two. Then I step back to watch their imagery unfold. My cold feet warm in the presence of these gifts.

  These are not Dante’s hell, but sandbox games between despots; camp stories told by Hitler to Stalin, spoken in jabbing whispers amid the flashlight glow of their shared tent; they are Bosche’s playful-sexy forest people, dancing in Armageddon’s last light, bodies blazing but not on fire, hair burning but not aflame; Bacon would smile at the deep shadows on faces in such pure form of birth’s head-stretching agony; Lucien Freud might weep. I’m touched in a place that makes me want to blush.

  OHHhhhooooo.

  The sound comes from my chest and belly. It’s hardly human, more a primate from that eighty-thousand-year genetic separation.

  “Happy-happy,” Pete says from behind me.

  “They belong in a museum,” I say, because it’s true.

  “Hey, thanks!” His appreciation strikes an intentionally flat chord. It’s my praise. It embarrasses him. He prefers technical terms and specific likes or doubts. He says, “You might have hit on something, though. Lately I’ve been thinking that a private collector would not want to risk sanity, hanging it in a home. My agent is talking with the Tate. The one in London.”

  I stand in candid ebullience, marveling at this man’s ingenuity and vision and technique. Peter comes beside me, holding paint tubes cradled in his shirt that he’s pulled out from his pants. He squats beside a low table and begins stacking deformed tubes one-handed into some order. Then he looks over at me. Except for my bellow and the amateur’s comment, I’ve not said a word. Peter must find this abnormal, because I’m otherwise chatterbox talkative in his studio. This is our space, our time as friends, time to be free and open, to talk art and theory and process, in candor and without the eavesdropping critique of non-artists. It’s stuff that most people don’t get, and find boring and insulting because they can’t speak the same language. We can be jargon filled, critical, or completely out there; art-house banter; pretentious because we can be; because it helps to mix the stale thoughts, or purge them to make room for new thoughts.

  Today is different; I know why, but Peter doesn’t. Some of my silence is the effect of his canvases, their bouts of balance, color, perspective, and whatever else I see here. Strong art ought to do this to everyone, regardless of the method or material. But I can’t get anything like this into the pieces I’ve worked on lately. The distinction between painting and sculpture doesn’t matter to me, not at the moment when I’m struggling. You can only try to strangle the idea, just to see if it has an afterlife. You hope it doesn’t (but sometimes you hope it does). Thinking like this, I wonder, How much is too much thinking, trying, not letting it happen? Artists can over-control the work, no matter how clear the idea. Peter shows indulgence for me because, as much as he can speak of the virtues of an artist’s process, he’d just as soon not become its drunken whore.

  “You’re working on something,” he says. The shadow of a long-gone lisp plays on the back edge of the sentence. Peter lightly slaps the side of his cheek.

  I come out of my trance. “I’m always working, Pete. Finishing has been the problem. Selling is a problem.” I’m conscious of breathing again.

  His head shakes. He reaches his hand out from inside the pile of tubes and points a long index finger, stained with yellow paint. “No, no. You’ve got something. What have you discovered, Minus?” I see a line from his eye to the yellow fingertip. It ends at my forehead. “Is it the meaning of life? Or just how to make it shine from stone? Tell me!”

  He’s right. Without thinking too hard on it, as I’ve watched his paintings’ movement, I’ve been wondering where the cereal throwing might take me. I mean, something that has visual context and isn’t abstractionist metaphysical bullshit. A mouthful, I know, but this is what you do from the moment any idea strikes, down to the last touch of the sanding cloth: question, doubt, sleep on it, act, react, re-sleep on it, and re-react (or start over). I want dimension, but it has to be recognizable. I need form that questions my humanness; but not my existence. I tell myself this often enough.

  Lack of ideas isn’t the problem. It’s likely I can make a case for the opposite. Ideas flood my imagination, crowding the frame with bulk and weight, where my eye is unable to rest on single objects. I liken this to looking up into falling snow until I spot one flake, high above, and then stick my tongue out to catch just that snowflake, and no other. All the others that touch your tongue don’t matter, and all the effort — physical, psychological, universal — puts a plug on anything else. I liken it also to cataclysmic sexual interruption: the parents returning home. That’s the idea. I liken it to a four-week vacation in the mountains, where it’s just me and my pup tent and a fishing rod, and then coming back to stand on a Times Square subway platform at the rush-hour. I also liken it to death.

  Peter’s question nags me into asking my own. Do I tell him?

  “Don’t tell me,” he says.

  He’s read my expression: artistic xenophobia. This information won’t turn his face into a pile of hurt. He knows I’ll fess up later, when what I’ve got (what I think I’ve got) makes sense to me. Which now it doesn’t. “How did you know?” I ask.

  Peter says, “You’re thinking way too hard. You look like I do when I cross a mirror after a special day. I’m always covered in paint. Makes me look like one of those wax crayon etchings we did in the first grade. Except, you aren’t covered in paint. The color is coming from beneath your skin. It’s like you have a sunset and moonrise happening inside your chest. Quite beautiful, actually. But it hurts. Am I right?”

  He smiles, and his teeth offset his skin, something he does to both accentuate White-America’s standard dislike of blacks, and to play-act the black-face Al Jolson, which far too many people don’t get because they’re culturally illiterate, a subject we get onto often with our shared TV-generation roots.

  If Peter’s telling me I’m going after “unique” too hard, I know at least I’m working. Still, I’m not willing to talk about my Cap’n Crunch moment, if that is his ploy. He finishes his tube organization while teasing me with “hmm, mmmm” and “looky-at-the-nooky” — bullshit-phrases aimed to embarrass me. I’m not buying, and when he gets this he shuts up. He picks up a glass palate and heads to the double washtub. The spigot rushes full blast while he stands waiting. When steam rises from the spray, he backs off on the water pressure and immerses the glass palate in the hot bath. “Think into it, bro,” he yells above the sprinkles and water rush. “Then work the idea like you know how. I see a spark in your eyes that’s been too long in coming.” His head whips around and his white eyes in the middle of that face are round and high beamed. “Not that you haven’t been doing outstanding stuff.”

  Now he’s flirting; I can play precocious.

  “I’ve got something, N. I don’t know what, yet, but I want a cycle to take shape,
to take me somewhere I haven’t been before or even think I’ve imagined.”

  “You aren’t waiting for inspiration, are you?” He shuts off the water and grabs a towel from a trio hanging on an iron rod beside the washtub.

  “What?” I say stupidly, because I’ve heard him just fine. I turn to his paintings and let my chin sink to my chest. “No, no,” I say. “Not more than what’s already come. I need to be in the studio. Put material together. Throw it together.” Belinda used the right phrase — Keep throwing!

  “Good, good, that’s good. Guys like you and me don’t need muses fucking with our minds.”

  Pete is spot-on. Just what I’ve needed to hear, and I’m glad Pete is the man who’s said it. Work (working) has always solved the riddle. (We’re talking about art here, of course, not cost analysis.) Last year I devised a whole color chart after spotting a bad Bondo job on the tail fins of a 1957 banana-yellow Cadillac. I kid you not. Often enough, getting to work can be that simple.

  I don’t believe in epiphanies, either, maybe less so than the muse. Epiphanies don’t exist to the artist that has done his homework and — and especially — makes something out of nothing, if for no other reason than because it is possible. Start a piece and follow it to some conclusion, logical or illogical. Some days, one is as effective as the other. Because what you thought was the end of a project can turn into the beginning of the real work you’d been looking for all along. Everything that is discovered in the process of making art, I believe, comes from some preparation, not by accident. Whether you know it or not, that proverbial thing that is “just around the corner” is, in fact, only a few steps away. I also leave room for serendipity.

  My head comes up. “Funny,” I say, “I just heard –” But I think about the words just coming, and change my mind. “No, it’s not so funny. Not to me. You be the judge; Belinda said something about muses this morning.” I describe for him her “musing,” but leave out the circumstances. I make a point to highlight my contra leanings from the whole physical muse-dom. When I think I’ve made sense, I close my mouth. Peter turns reflective. He stares away, at something on the wall or maybe through it by a hundred miles. As though he alone hears some sound.

  “Yeah,” he says. His voice is soft, like a kid whispering to a friend in the treehouse. “Sounds like something a muse would say.”

  “False images,” I say. “Muse myths become a bit creepy, and – what’s the pop-psychology phrase these days? – create co-dependence. I got tired of praying to graven idols, which muses are by any definition. Anyway, from what I can see, muses and artists equal nothing … Actually, I don’t get it. Is a muse envious of her artist?”

  Peter nods. A bit too sagely, though, and I wonder what’s to come spewing from his mouth. “She can’t do what he can,” he says. “This is the muse I’m talking about, not Belinda in particular, if you know what I mean. Wendy, too. No matter.

  “The muse can’t make herself rise above what she is in life. This leaves her with one fallback: use her living appeal — you know, the thing that makes her wanted by artists — to absorb adulation from other non-muses, or hatred and wrath sent out by competing muses. Jealousy, fear, hate, even revenge plays a part, I think; beauty does this to women, and it works against other women. Men too, but we get into fights to let off the steam. First, I mean. Seems to work fine for swinging dicks. That other stuff, that’s all different, artistic envy and jealousy. It’s not worth talking about. Say, I’ve been meaning to ask, what’re you reading these days?”

  My eyebrows flash. (Julia Child for her lessons on herbs; Marcus Aurelius and his speech elocution; Ovid’s doomed love verses; Whitman’s present continuous verbs; Epicurus on “the good life”; and coffee table ditties on art Impressionism, Romanticism, and Classicism. The books are stacked like leftover fish bones on my studio tables. A month of reading, two months.) I say, “Not much, Pete,” to which he opens his mouth to respond, but closes it and peers through shaded eyes.

  Then he says, “Pick something up, dude.” It’s in his tone that he knows something about me I’ve just told him without admitting it. I must have flunked the eyebrow test. Peter takes this lightly, knowing I’m private at the early stages of a project; private is a word he understands as xenophobia. He stays with the subject: “I’ve found reading eases my working mind after a day around paint fumes. An art book can do the trick for you; some critic you can argue with through transom thoughts.”

  “Hmm. Critics….” I spread my fingers, flex them like a pianist, or a street thug.

  Peter laughs. “Yeah, yeah. Fuck’em.” He rummages through a box of tools, picks up a shiny palette knife and, as afterthought and mirrored in knife’s sliver of reflection, sees himself and the purple polka dots on his head. He picks one away, winces, and puts the knife down. “I meant to ask,” he says to me now. “How’s Zeppo doing? I haven’t seen much of him in the last few months. Not since his assemblage thing over at that Queens gallery. Is he okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Fine. Speaking of a man and his muses. The guy has models around all the time. No, don’t give me that look. An artist paints, and models are his whatever whatever. So it is like it is, he has new models in every week. Sometimes two or three at a time. I feel like I’m working in the same studio as Klimt. A couple weeks ago I heard him use the term octotych. I took it to mean he’s got something linear going on.”

  Peter folds his arms. “Hmm. Sounds biblical. If I know Zeppo, it’ll be ‘Old Testament meets Times Square.’ Not so far off, anyway, don’t we know. Tell him I said ‘Hey!’ — will you? Okay. I’m done down here. You want to go upstairs and have a sandwich. One of my specials. I’ll open a bottle of beer for you.”

  “What about the light meter?”

  Peter stops. I watch his face wrinkle. “Oh – yeah, of course. What was I thinking? Bring that puppy this way and I’ll explain what I’ve got in mind.”

  I roll my eyes because, but for all its purpose that got me here in the first place, I should be at the Beehive throwing cereal at wire dummies to see what sticks and what stinks. All the stuff we’ve been talking about!

  While I dig into my backpack, Peter saunters to the far wall and uncovers four paintings under burlap. I recognize them. They are part of a twenty-three painting motif. Each is an impasto with contrasting colors. The layers are so thick in spots, I wonder aloud how it hasn’t slid off the canvas. Peter uses the phrase “patience and hope,” which sounds like a long sigh, although the breathing doesn’t follow the words. He’s worked on them for more than a year.

  For the next forty-five minutes, while standing on the ladder he’s pulled beneath his photo floods, he switches between a stack of colored celluloid filter sheets, placed on the ladder’s paint tray, from which he holds up to one light aimed at each canvas. He alters the spotlight between two pre-set angles, and changes the intensity as the light is trained on or just above each canvas. Meanwhile, I work the light meter. Until he’s happy with the readings I call out, he shuffles between filter colors. Each is a gradient of rose or orange or purple. For every change he likes, he pencils the information into a notebook. Sometimes he makes a quick decision (“Next!”), but several of the color changes transfix him, and I stand immobile for many minutes. My role is that of the judgmental viewer (average time looking at a museum painting: 3 seconds); the experienced eye of the visiting artist; the studied attention of the professional critic; and the “truth-telling” curatorial intern. Each utterance I make gives Peter some idea for how his work can hang just right, and no righter, for the show. When he’s satisfied that all he has done is all he can do, I stash away the light meter. He promises lunch a second time, and my stomach gurgles its appreciation.

  Upstairs in the kitchen, with cold beers in front of us on the chop-a-block island, Peter forms a puzzled look and says, “Did I ever tell you that my childhood dream was to matriculate at Juilliard?” He’s spreading mustard on a slice of rye bread. In the background, Cole Porter’s �
�Night and Day” plays from a small box radio. “I kept my plan a secret for three weeks. Didn’t tell a soul. Then I sprang it on my parents one evening at the dinner table. I made this little masterpiece with my plate of spaghetti. I called it Red Worm Trail of Tears. We were studying Indians in school at the time, so the influence was obvious.” He folds thin ham slices on one bread slice, and tears lettuce for the other side. “It was a vague stylistic rip-off of Jackson Pollack meets Freddie Kruger. My parents applauded. And while they twirled their spaghetti onto forks, using that Italian method we’d all learned from watching The Godfather, I declared to the world that I was going to photograph my plate and use it on my application to Juilliard.” He finishes the sandwich with a grind of pepper and puts the halves together. “They eased me down from that mountain high real quick. Life’s not been the same ever since.”

  “How does a New York kid not know that Juilliard is a performance school?” I ask.

  “So shoot me! I hadn’t seen Fame yet. Besides, Momma didn’t want me to hear swear words or see Irene Cara’s titties.” He picks up the two plates on which he’d piled potato chips beside the sandwiches.

  I follow him to his kitchen table beside a window overlooking a small garden in the courtyard. I notice Pete’s girlfriend, Wendy, working outside. I hadn’t known she was home. Wendy is kneeling in mulch, her pale arms stained black up to her elbows as she takes pansies from a flat and works them into holes dug in an arc behind a red-brick, serrated edge. Her face is stained by dirt marks, like a hobo, so light in places that they could be done by pencil, cross-hatches to give shadow, curve, definition. Peter is as inured to her presence outside as an old tabby sitting on a ledge watching birds dance in its yard. He puts the plates down gently and slides a chair out for me with one foot. “So that’s what for,” he says. I sit and we stare across the corner of the table at each other. We eat in silence for a while. The crunching potato chips, and our lips syphoning beer from the bottles, comfort us.

  I have to ask. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  He looks over, brows stitched, then his eyes roll up for a second to work over the question. He’s got it and says, “Dude. I was fourteen at the time. I was in love with two things: watercolor paints (black and yellow), and Playboy centerfolds. Cut a bitch some slack, can you, please?”

  Whenever Peter N talks street, or tries to, he’s never able to clip his natural politeness. It’s like watching some After School Special actor-dad trying to reach across a generation with nomenclature he can’t commit to memory. I have a ready answer for him.

  “Right on, G. You gots’ta come crib’n widda homeys. Catch us up sump kitty an’a coupl’a’tree forties! Knows whats t’i mean –”

  “Hey now!” Peter jumps in. “I think you had better not say the next word, Minus.” He uses his spatula to emphasize the reprimand. “Don’t think I didn’t grow up getting razzed by my Philly relatives. They called me Coat of Arms.”

  “The breast patch thing?”

  “It’s called a school emblem.” He shakes his head in disgust for the memory. “Bunch’a wannabe niggas.”

  I make a face. “Pete, come on, man. You don’t have to use that word around me. I come from Chi, and you get a whole head full of it living the white-suburban life. Those bozos wouldn’t know cool if they laid their dicks against a light pole in winter.”

  “No, you don’t get to use it for that. Hell, at least I’m black! Even if I’m not street.”

  Peter calls himself a “Jefferson.” Not by namesake, but through the power of television. His family moved from Queens to the Upper East Side in the mid-Seventies, when being black in NYC was beautiful — at least according to blacks themselves, if not especially linked to the sit-com send-ups scrubbed clean by the networks for family viewing. More or less. His psychologist mother and chiropodist father enrolled their precocious man-child (with a crew cut and a slight lisp) into an East Side prep school. This was years before crack cocaine began to eat away at what had been a perennially surging “minority” community (poly-sci speak for anyone not WHITE) that some culture critics had cited as the “New Harlem Renaissance.” Peter lost his lisp within a year or so, and found art class was the only thing that made him happy.

  “Hey, Minus. Do I look old to you?”

  While I’ve known Peter for several years, I’ve only seen him regularly since moving to New York. Peter is my age, almost exactly. We nearly share a September birthday. He works out; lifts weights at a Bally’s near Battery Park, runs around its indoor track. His baldness is the product of a hereditary recessional hairline that he’s taken control of, not allowing it to be the other way around. Peter looks good. But what does age have to do with anything else? I can only feel it in myself.

  “Pete,” I say. “I gotta get going.”

  “Keep arting, Minus.”