My new digs were walking distance to the Museum of Fine Arts, the Glassell School, the Italian Cultural Center, and the Jung Center.
A neighbor was a professor at the Glassell, and he used to have garden parties to show off his art.
After moving to Carolina and starting my novel manuscript, I figured out that I was going to have to write some short stories to show off my art. Sigh.
So I set my first story in my museum district neighborhood, and John Pence was nice enough to print this in The Blotter about five years ago.
The Art of Kissin and Stealin
Come inside my air conditioned room and have a whiskey. I've been drinking whiskey for some twenty years. Had my gums rubbed with the amber liquor when I was teething. Whiskey is entwined with the history of my state—the oak barrels near Getsemanee and the mint julep that’s served at Churchill Downs. But personal history has taken me far from that land that DeSoto roamed in the 1500’s to this land that is larger and hotter.
Have a seat. In spite of the heat, it’s a beautiful day to sit at the window and watch the leaves blow from the trees. A noncommittal sun is making intermittent cameos. The gray sky is a blank slate for the ruby, orange and banana yellow leaves that flutter and spin on their way to stillness and decay. In other parts of the country, the air conditioners have long been silenced. In Texas, their noise will have to compete with the blare of the leaf blowers and lawn mowers for a few more months. In the summer, the lawn companies make their rounds early in the day so that the work can be finished before the heat of the afternoon. But in the fall, they come later and later each week.
Pedro wasn’t any different. His men started to interfere with my open-air sessions in mid-October. I had an art class at the Glassell School in the early afternoon. No sooner than I would get home and set up that I would I hear the Latino music that blared from his van. This gave me roughly three minutes to haul my palette and canvas inside, but the easel would stay on the driveway. Later I would dust the flecks of freshly cut grass off of its unstained wood.
Eventually I accepted their late arrival as another source of domestic annoyance. One of the many necessary digressions that an artist faces, like paying bills and cleaning the bathroom. Nonetheless, the new schedule was really starting to get my goat. I’d been feeling out of sorts lately. I was growing sick of the portraiture work that kept food on the table and allowed me to live in the tony museum district of Houston, if only in a garage apartment. What I really wanted to do was get my hands back into clay. I hadn’t actually bought any yet, because of my impulse control problem. I knew that once I bought the clay, there’d be no more heads on the canvas, no more fat checks to cash, and eventually, no electricity for that much-needed air conditioning. Then I’d be hot and grumpy.
I was painting topless one day, something I did when I was feeling uninspired or just couldn’t get the creative juices flowing. I had broken into the bottle a little early too, in fact, two hours before my five o’clock special of whiskey on the rocks.
This time there was no loud Latino music to announce the truck, no sudden cacophony of voices, no cranking of the mower. Just Pedro. “Seniorita,” he called out as he rounded the corner of the house and entered the backyard.
I turned and looked at him just before I realized that my breasts were out of a shirt.
“Santa Maria!” he exclaimed, as he made the sign of the cross.
I dropped the palette. Splat, the green liquid made a stellate pattern on the ground where the board landed near my bare feet, which were speckled with paint. I backed up to get out of the paint, upsetting my Styrofoam cup of whiskey and nearly toppling the easel.
Simultaneously, a river of whiskey and Pedro ran toward me, Pedro with his hand over his eyes as if my breasts would blind him. Sensing that he had somehow played a part in this man-made disaster, he was evidently going to help me restore harmony despite my partial nudity.
“No Pedro, no necessito.” I didn’t know how to speak Spanish, but it worked because he stopped mid-sprint and turned around, and even though he was facing the other way, he kept his hand shield over his eyes.
I grabbed my shirt from the branch of the tree and fumbled with the buttons. When I had covered myself and righted the easel, I turned to find Pedro still as stone. A light brown sculpture in my corner of the yard, draped in worker’s clothes. That’s when I knew what I had to have.
I thought about Pedro and the family that I knew he must have. I could almost be certain of where they lived, the apartments in the part of town near the Fiesta market. The area where gang graffiti had first appeared tentatively on dumpsters, then on the sides of buildings before boldly defacing road signs. The graffiti was not in words. Not ones that I could decipher. It looked more like hieroglyphics. The broadly curving lines conjured thoughts of sinuous calves and orb-like buttocks. I was sure that these were not the images the graffiti artist had intended to confer. To those in the know, the messages probably screamed, “Shitbags, this is our gang’s turf. Stay away, or I’ll smash your face and rape your sister.” Yes, Pedro’s wife probably shopped at this Fiesta, and she could probably use some extra money to buy food for the family.
But no, it was cerveza. That’s what Pedro asked me for the first time that he sat for me. I racked my brain, which was wired to understand English first, French second, and Italian third. “No say,” I improvised.
“Cerveza,” he repeated, and tilted his head back and took a swig from his hand that evidently represented a bottle, his thumb, the neck of the bottle.
Something to drink. Oh. I had whiskey.
When I returned from my apartment, Styrofoam cup of whiskey in hand, he was sitting on a stone bench near the yellow lantana, taking off his T-shirt. That’s when I first saw Santa Maria. I saw her hanging from a gold chain on his hairy, burly chest, just above his Buddha belly. So this is where East meets West. “No Pedro, no necessito.”
He stopped. This line was coming in handy. His black eyes looked at me imploringly, all forty-five years of his pride on the line. Yes, I have noticed your biceps, and yes I have dreamed of your pecs, but I want to sculpt you the way you looked the day that you stood stock still because I was half-naked.
Some sittings and a few whiskeys later, I had a sculpture. I felt bad about my Pedro’s outcome. He ended up under a tree in a man’s front yard, just two blocks north of my street. Sure, the proximity suited me fine. It’s just that this was the home of the man who paid two Hispanic men to hand wash his Hummer and his wife’s H2 in his driveway every Saturday morning. He had help at his house every day. Last Halloween, the help carved pumpkins on the front porch with his children. This ostentation was despicable, and I had to rescue Pedro’s form from its new lawn jockey status.
Before I even masterminded the plot to have Pedro’s brother underbid a job at the house so that he could dismantle the motion sensor lights, wait for a new moon, and bribe Pedro with beer (which I now know is cerveza) to carry out my heist, I considered the bottom line of stealing my Pedro. I would never be able to exhibit the statue. It could never stand in grace next to the other sculptures in the garden across from the Museum of Fine Arts. If I suddenly had the sculpture again, wouldn’t it be proof that I was a thief? Circumstantial evidence, or something like that? My apartment was small. Not only would I have to stow my big Pedro in a small apartment, I would have to hide him under a sheet.
We carried it off, all right. And I was the driver of the black Toyota truck. Pedro and his brother narrowly outran the insomniac au pair who screamed for the police at the top of her lungs. They shared a ride in the bed of the truck with my Pedro as I drove to Fiesta for more cerveza. Just in time to watch the graffiti artist wielding a can of green spray paint.
You’d like to see my Pedro? Come into my bedroom; he’s in the back corner. Oh, no need to turn on the light. Santa Maria, you taste like whiskey.
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