One Night Stand With Art

A One Night Stand With Art

I was playing keyboards in a post-punk-indie-rock band and working in a factory that assembled motorized wheelchairs when I met her. She’d been sent over from the temp agency for an eight-hour day at the factory, but at lunchtime she told me, with a candy bar in hand, that minimum wage was a scam and she was going to drink whiskey at the bar down the street. She said her name was Art, and she asked if I wanted come with her. Of course, post-punk-indie-rock star that I was, I agreed.

We sat next to each other at the bar and drank Wild Turkey by the glass. We chain-smoked cigarettes and crossed and re-crossed our legs. We puffed a joint behind the dumpster in the parking lot. Then we walked back inside and made out in the men’s bathroom, on the toilet and the sink and the floor, where she told me between kisses that work was meaningless and I should quit my job, forever, because other things were far more important, like literature and painting and sculpting and photography and video and dance and music. Like Art, she said.

Later, after we stumbled into her apartment, I gazed at the preschool-style finger paintings on her walls and decided she was right. I told her I would never work again, and I would dedicate myself to Art, to post-punk-indie-rock in particular. She said it was a good idea, as long as I didn’t mean her when I said Art, and we tore off our clothes.

We were drunk and stoned, and I lost myself in her skin. We tangled on the couch and I kissed the contours of her hips and inner thighs. I shut my eyes, and in my head I pictured piano keys, chipped and dusted, violas and violins, drums and cymbals, and a muted trumpet blaring needles of red and yellow haze.

“Max Ernst!” she cried as I pressed my tongue against her. “Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock died in the sunset!” She grabbed my ears and pulled my head up to her chest, and she told me that painters died every day for their paintings and writers wrote every day or died. She said that Art mimicked life, made it a better place, taught us how to see ourselves, was completely patriarchal, and had ceased to exist five hundred years ago.

I told her that she was crazy.

And she said it was best if I didn’t talk, because in the end we were only masking our alienation, together, while the world spun out of control. Then she pushed my head back down between her legs and told me to kiss her again, and I had no choice, because after all, her name was Art.