sketch book update

new(ish) paintings

The Wanderer - 2011 - Oil on Canvas

Odalisque - 2011 - Oil on Canvas

sketchbook

sketchbook

sweating in the booth

Last summer I took a job as a parking lot attendant in Atlantic City, Nj. I sat in a booth and read a lot of books. I also wrote this.

Sweating in the booth

The air is thick, like a blanket made of dead dogs and wet dryer lint. Desire does not exist within the confines of this rectangle.

“How are ya’ today Eugene?”

“Ohhhhaaaright now,” flies out from deep in his gut.

Eugene works at the bar next to my parking lot. He’s the size of a professional wrestler. In our brief moments of daily conversation he mentions the humidity. He takes a pill for his high blood pressure. He says he has a weak heart. His heart is probably the size of a cantaloupe.

Everyday, “Ohhhaaaright now.”

A bead of sweat rolls off my forehead and lands on the diamond plated floor curdling the thin layer of something that covers everything. There are few ways to occupy time in the booth and I switch back and forth between them frequently. One of them is trying to get the radio to work. Less than half of the classical network comes in on the clock radio. The other half is saturated with static refuse seeping through from the invisible waves that surround us. An insurance advertisement buries a symphony. If I place my hand on top of the clock radio the signal comes in crystal clear, a solitary moment of musical heaven. My arm gets tired and my hand strays. The moments of music pass quicker in speed, shorter in temper and the minuscule instant of bliss dissolves just as the thin cloud bands before me. A hundred or so people in unison playing a song that’s probably a hundred years old is buried under the babbling of some asshole. Sanctity void. Sex with the lights off is probably my sole conventional practice, but I’m usually in fit enough moods to say that sacred things were alright. The droll accent of an insurance gecko is floating through invisible airwaves right now. Soon we’ll see his charming billboard protruding from the ocean floors as a monument to a secular culture.

“The rate is ten dollars every four hours, you pay on the way out, have a good one.”

Have a good one, have a good one, have a good one. I say this too much. I question each word. A breeze drags through the parking lot like a body at the apex of a plague epidemic. It smells like urine and fried food. Boiling night old whiskey howls inside my gut. The brain hangs onto something else. Chimpanzees fighting primitive wars, hallucinatory I see the dreams of every person born blind and in an instant like a star so large that gravity sucks its light back in, it disappears. I remove my glasses and wipe the sweat off my face. “OHHHHAAAL RIGHT NOW!” It isn’t even noon yet and I’m already drenched in sweat. The sun has risen enough so that it no longer shines directly through the windows. The booth provides relief. The droning of cicadas is the sound of heat. Only hot air comes from the fan.

The door of my booth faces a one way street. All day long cars go down it the wrong way. As an army of ants carry off pieces of my fingernail, a man on a bicycle is hit by a car as he crosses the street. Both men begin to yell at each other, vacationing families stop to watch. I’m eating peanuts by the handful. A car pulls up to the booth and interrupts my show. “Never a dull moment in Atlantic City baby!” says the man in the car. I envision giant predatory animals running down people in the street. I give them a ticket and they pull away. I sit back down and search for a pencil. Next to the radio is a small pink stuffed bear about the size of a large grapefruit. A previous attendant had burnt a hole on the side of the bears face and stuck a cigarette into it. Menthol. He was fired for stealing.

The dull luster of the marble floor only reflects what’s going on in the most general sense. Yellow and orange blurs of shapes bounce on the sections of floor that aren’t covered in thick puddles of wax and burnt polyester. Joan of Arc melts into a puddle and flows across the floor before mixing with a puddle that contains the remnants of Bettie Page. A wax museum is burning to the ground. In the center of the room I stand on a dislocated Corinthian capital. The beads of sweat that roll down my cheeks are made of wax. Soon I will join the others on the floor in a congealed pool of synthetic resins and oils. Everything begins to resemble the marble floor distorted and skewed. A fire engine barrels down the one-way whaling and shrieking. My eyes open. I’m still in the booth. The air distorts its cry as it moves farther away. Right now there is something else burning to the ground.

I use my shirt to wipe my face and rub my eyes. When I look up there is an older woman, to my left, dawning blue polyester pants, floral pattern something and a cart full of empty plastic bags. She is mouthing words to a pile of mulch but I can’t read her lips. Eugene walks triumphantly across the parking lot. I find a pencil in the drawer buried under single serving salt & pepper and ketchup packets. I try to focus and write. Far below the mist of crashing waves and brown brine lies the entrance to a cave guarded by eyeless eels and sulfurous bacteria. Inside the cave a blind man attempts to thread a needle.

A large cloud boils like an aggravated crescendo breathing and swelling until it blots out the sun. Cast under the immense shadow I wonder if the world is ending. Out of the cloud’s center rides Dionysus. His chariot is covered in flowers and wreaths. A trail of petals falls behind as he descends upon the parking lot. One by one they fall into what would seem to be an assigned place. The pile gives birth to a woman with long black hair. She is trying to destroy my mind. Love flares up raw and uncontrollably out of her body like a thunderstorm after a miserable heat wave. The sound of a bus’s air-breaks puts the earth back under my feet. I look around, only a handful of cars in the lot, no chariot. A plastic bag is stuck flapping in the chain link fence. The wind is a long drawn-out breath.

One car enters and two cars leave. A barefoot old man in a canary yellow t-shirt walks towards the booth. His face is solemn and weathered. He asks me how to get to the train station. The train station is behind the parking lot. You can see it through the back window of the booth. By the time I ask for directions I’m usually within sight of my destination, thinking I’m lost while I’ve been going the right way the whole time. I lean my head back and rest it on the frame of the open window behind me. With my eyes closed and the sun directly above me my eyelids turn into pink tissue paper. I embrace the ten thousand things and roll them into one. The booth provides relief.