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The role of art
And then as soon as you turn your back, they have half your books and a good camera jammed in the bottom of "the handbag." It seems like they're always fishing around that handbag for something. As if it's some kind of religious pilgrimage, fingers and eyes intensely swimming through the flotsam of previous scores. A spent tube of opaque navy blue oil paint, a Dostoevsky with the cover torn off and every page dog-eared, some loose tissues, a can of hairspray, a Jane's Addiction disc, a thing of mascara. And that stupid brush full of hair. How they get tooth marks in the things is beyond comprehension. This takes me back to a few years ago when I had a very hateful falling out with an old poet friend that I knew 15 years ago in the city. I had promised to come over one night with a bag of dope but I was too wasted to drive and he later threatened to kill me. Anyway, all of his women were of this handbag species. Smart women aren't attracted to struggling poets whose only human contact is the pawn broker and the bartender. Naturally, he became a magnet for the bottom-feeders, scammers on the lookout for sensitive losers with "I love abuse" charred in their eyes. If you're an abuser, find yourself a struggling poet. Or an artist for that matter. They love abuse. Take it from a pro. If you're even a semi-creative person, you start out with a big mission to save the world. You get a little older and settle for trying to save whatever you can. And then you finally realize you'd better just save yourself, and to hell with everything else, because life is pure idiocy and the only prize in this ring-toss is in discovering an avenue to make it through with minimal scars. The last time I saw my poet friend he was deeply engrossed with turning the ceiling of his dingy apartment into a miniature Sistine Chapel, gluing up thousands of illustrations stolen from expensive library art books. When I first met him, he would take along a backpack and steal the books in their entirety, two or three at a time. But after the library installed a new alarm system at the checkout, he was forced to sneak in with a razor and carefully slice out the images. In our building, the rent was a hundred bucks, and the floors and walls were so thin, all you could hear were the echoes of your drunk neighbors slapping their wives around and breaking stuff. After you've dealt with "Please don't hit me again, daddy. Please, not again," for the hundredth time, you get numb to it. You find a good addiction, and it becomes your shelter. Good poets, however, are too sensitive to escape it, and my friend figured if he glued enough art clippings up there, he might create a barrier between himself and that hell. His ceiling was the only beautiful thing in a 20-block radius. The new priest at a nearby church had given up planting flowers outside because the neighborhood kids would run through at night and smash them. It was as if they were watching for the man to plant them, calculating, plotting, scheming, their beady sewer rat eyes jutting from behind soiled curtains until nightfall when everything in the streets is fair game. The priest would plant more and more flowers, week after week. The kids would smash them again and again. And, eventually, the priest gave up. "They don't want anything living here," said the poet. "It is a filthy city, and we are among the dead." Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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I was gonna pull a quote from Céline's Death on the Installment Plan to start this off, but somebody stole my only copy. That's right, somebody stole my Céline. Right off the shelf. Probably another one of those kleptomaniac neurotic artiste babes that I drug off the street in a moment of weakness. You know the kind. Jittery and preoccupied under a slick veil of phony Warholian cool. They act like they're admiring all your stuff, walking around the house like it's a museum. But what's really going on is they're sizing up the situation.
