Fire in the Belly - Act 2: Working In The Belly

“I’ll pay for these.” He said, dropping them on the cart.

When we arrived at the new building we had a hard time finding a place to park. The dock was full, and the neighboring buildings were all covered with restricted parking signs. We sat there for five minutes before he turned to me. “What should we do?”

“We should go in there,” I said, pointing to a small fish shack next door, “and eat dinner.” Their parking lot was large and empty.

“What about our stuff?”

“We can eat in the car.”

After dinner we found a slot at the dock and I went inside to find the elevator. It was on the fourth floor, so it took a while to find the thing. The freight elevator was a large shambling box with overhead doors on two sides. Engraved with gang tags and vows of love, it smelled of oil and bearing grease. It made a loud clanking noise while in motion, and the woven metal grates which served for interior doors bounce up and down. It was lacking a roof by design, so you could see the workings of the cables reaching up four stories. The thing was magnificent. As it rumbled down I was filled with hope. The new space was big, and it offered possibility. So what if I had to share it with a frat boy? He’d be easy to manage. Otherwise I’d planned to simply ignore him, and I’d already gotten some practice at the hardware store that day.

“It’s way more relevant than science, y’know? Man can’t go on without it.” he paused and drew breath deeply. “I really don’t know how I could live in a world without art.”

I read labels in the checkout aisle. What a dork.

We loaded the material into the elevator.

“Do you think my car will be ok?”

“Yes,” I said, “your Cherokee will be fine.”

We went upstairs and we built work benches. We drank beer and smoked pot. There was no music. Around midnight the foundry lit up: a night pour. We would come to anticipate these rare pours, and it was hard to get any work done on those nights. We had the perfect industrial/urban view. The room’s longest wall was south facing, and four large windows provided a spectacular view. To the right stood the rusted iron mounds of the Cozzi scrap yard. Occasionally barges would moor there and fill up. Trucks of all sizes moved in and out all day long, depositing their loads of scrap metal. Finkel Foundries lies across the river, on the eastern side, covering the river on both sides of Cortland Avenue, and then moving east for about 5 blocks. Downtown Chicago is the backdrop for all this, the opposite end of the process which either begins or ends across the street from our studio.

It stayed warm into early November that fall, but our comfort was short lived. By December we were feeling the lack of a furnace. The truth is we had a furnace, what we were lacking was gas service. Neither of us could afford it, so we bundled up and brought in our space heaters from home.
It was cold. It was Chicago in December. What were we thinking? The cold made it hard to work. I tried to be romantic about it, remembering that Picasso and Braque had once shared a coat. It didn’t help. Was I Picasso or Braque in this relationship? The possibilities made me shiver. Meanwhile Roger soldiered on. I began to suspect that he was mocking me with his enthusiasm. And he was always there! I moved my bench to the other end of the room.

I found out in a hurry that he was loose with money. Before long we had a chop saw, another drill and a saber saw. Ryobi, Porter Cable, Milwaukee, only pro grade stuff. He let me know right away that I was free to use his tools as needed, and I didn’t waste any time in taking him up on his offer.
It’s not like I didn’t contribute; someone had to provide the hand tools, and we used my stereo for music. I always brought beer, and he seemed to rarely do that. Even when he did bring beer it was bad beer. Miller Lite, or Michelob. Yuppy beer. I was coiled for the night that he’d show up with wine coolers. Fortunately that sorry night never came.

So we negotiated a method, and for a while it worked pretty well. But there were times, and they weren’t few, when he would say something so stupid that I could barely contain myself.
“Y’know, man, life is really like a pendulum.” He was swinging a plumb bob just above the floor. “Your ability to tolerate pain,” he said as the bob reached one side, “determines the amount of joy you’re capable of experiencing.”

“Uh huh.”

“It’s wild, man, y’know? It’s really really wild.”

“Uh, yeah.”

What a yutz. It was a while before I figured out that he wasn’t a lawyer after all. He was a corporate real estate sales guy. He had a license, but he didn’t have any buildings of his own. He spent his days cold calling small industrial businesses and getting hung up on. I would have quit that job in a day, but ol’ Roger just soldiered on. He seemed to soldier in all things.

We had to establish right away that I wasn’t about to tolerate bad music. He didn’t even seem to care.

“OK,” he said, “maybe you can turn me on to some new tunes.”

“Well,” I said, turning to the tape deck. “Check out Motorhead. They make some good ‘tunes’.”

I used that word every time I widened his world with something new. And it was all new to him! It was like he’d lived in a classic rock cocoon his whole life, believing every word they sold him. We fixed that in a hurry. I gave him everything. I gave him his muse. In return he took from me the one thing that made life worth living. In the end I managed to transfer this theft into my own personal liberation, but i still resent the need to do so. He took everything from me.

Even though he was there all the time, it became easier to avoid him. There were plenty of nights when I would barely speak to him, and I had a good reason to stay away once he started producing good art. The titles were awful - contrived, pseudo intellectual, lurid and emotional - and he would explain them as if he were being interviewed for ArtNews. But the pieces were too good, and even if I rarely said so, I couldn’t deny it to myself.

They were arresting, activating and fresh. His approach was completely intuitive, which was all the more annoying given his lack of any form of training. As his creative successes mounted, my frustration bloomed. Every time I set my tortured eyes upon one of these pieces my stomach would turn and sink. Every success of his translated into a personal failure for me.

I decided a project would be the thing to bust my needle out of it’s bad groove, so I took on a portrait commission. In exchange for $500 I’d paint a double portrait. It was a lay up. Having cranked through similar projects for pocket money in art school, I approached this painting with brassy confidence. Roger Murray would soon see where the talent resided in this studio. The painting was meant to be a surprise, so I had to work from a dim, out of focus Polaroid. There hadn’t been very much light in the room when the shot was taken. My patron asked me to correct the curve in his mother’s nose; she’d fallen recently, breaking it. I responded by smoking weed until I couldn’t see the break in her septum. It was a chemical septoplasty.

Even if I’d finished that piece, even if it had been the best painting to ever come out of me, even if it had been the fucking Madonna of The Rocks, it would have been a hollow victory. Roger was already my biggest fan.

“You could make some serious money,” he said, looking as though he may cry, “you really could.”
How can you say thanks to that? What did he know about me or my work? Nothing. Nothing at all. His highest praise came from watching me sketch and draw cartoons! Stupid, puny, unfunny little cartoons. His praise was worthless.

But as a sculptor he was a natural, that prick. I really think he mocked me with his optimism. I spent that winter frustrated and depressed. Reaching for the thread I’d lost, fantasizing about that fire, wondering what type of work I’d be turning out had the building not burned.

Next week: Act 3: Roger Gets A Break

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