ArtinSpace: April 2009

Shirley and Diana go to Manhattan.

Shirley and Diana had decided to take a holiday to Manhattan. Shirley had to call her employers and ask for the week off. She cleaned house for a young family who lived nearby and who both worked. She terrorised their children by insisting (in a hiss sometimes) that they must clean alongside her. Diana just disappeared from her job. She was a drinker and constantly out of work, shifting from waitress jobs to factory work to cleaning to the government handout. She would ask Shirley when they got back if she could sleep at hers while she got back on her feet.

They arrived in the city late in December, the snow was falling and it was so cold that they were happy. Shirley bought two tickets for the ice skating rink out front of the Rockefeller centre. Diana couldn’t remember the last time she had so much fun. Normally it’s me top that’s saturated on a Saturday night, she screamed. If Shirley had been home she would have been embarrassed, but in a new city, it seemed lascivious, and that wasn’t all bad.

Diana was a tall blond. Actually Diana was a mid height brunette but through an irregular dye job and some stratospheric wedges, she was a tall blonde. She was glamorous and leggy and this made her regal. It allowed her, she felt, to get away with the occasional crass statement, just a little something to keep people guessing, she thought. Diana swore like a trooper and everyone knew exactly who she had slept with in the past year.

Shirley came from the mid west and was clearly of Norwegian stock, with her tilting accent and deep blue eyes. Head cocked, dressed in straining jeans and a blouse, she was becoming hippy. Nobody questioned the silence surrounding her love life, which was non-existent. She wore new white trainers for this excursion to New York. It was only around children that she started to take on character. And now, in this city, she was finding an unexpected strength also. Without an audience of locals she was relishing Diana’s brash take on life. They were sharing a room at a hotel, mid town. Shirley was going to make a pass at Diana…

Joseph and Tom meet once a year on a back lot of the Warner Bros studios in Los Angeles and they share a coffee. The coffee is usually not that great and the time spent together is rarely enjoyable. They meet because Jodie, Tom’s wife wants him to have more friends outside of his own industry, which is travel writing. “It’s too insular” she says. “You only ever meet Tibetans, well, America has a perfectly good cultural life too, you know!” she says. “Why don’t you go meet up with Joseph?” she asks. So Tom calls Joseph and after a series of voice messages left, back and forth, they meet. In college they had briefly shared a dorm and often crossed paths in the world arts and cultures department. The last nights sharing had turned into a hallucinatory time. Tom fell in love with Joseph, surprising himself in the process. Joseph, a lively, worldly and open man didn’t reciprocate the feeling but wasn’t averse to an adventure. As a theatre major he was comfortable being adored. Things started when Tom said he was throwing out some clothes. Joseph went through them and chose some shirts out for himself. He tried them on and then offered a costume from one of his early theatre productions to Tom. “Come on, dress ups” he insisted. Tom laughed and whipped off his shirt and put on the top, which he couldn’t get past his shoulders. Next came off the pants, losing balance he lost his briefs…In the early hours they were still dressing and undressing, drinking and smoking a privacy into being. They kissed. They fooled around some more. Joseph came first, then Tom. Things got awkward for the first couple weeks after Tom had moved out. He was sharing with a mix of students from the art department. It was close and friendly and through them, not long after moving in, he met Jodie. Tom and Joseph caught up on campus occasionally and at a party one night Jodie met Joseph. She liked him without knowing why. She didn’t want to be his friend but was happy for her boyfriend to have a friend like him, someone who would be successful one day. A little careless in his friendships, absorbed in his career and always thinking for tomorrow, she would think. Joseph, for his part, barely registered Jodie and didn’t think about those last days in the dorm with Tom. Tom was just another guy from college that he had enjoyed hanging around with, who would call occasionally, out of the blue. Joseph often wondered what Tom did for a living. All he knew was that Tom was away a lot and had married someone from college. He remembered the feel of another mans chest, rather than Lynda’s breasts. He called Lynda.

Joseph and Tom didn’t know one another, that much was clear. Tom came across Joseph in a book he found. The painting of Joseph, whose real name was, well, who remembered, long, aristocratic and boringly English…The painting of Joseph was lovely. He was a serene looking man, once you cut out the foolish looking wife, photo shopped her hand out from his arm and blocked out the yapping dog at his feet. And disappeared the fields from behind him. Tom gets hayfever. His friends call it gayfever. He thinks its funny but it sort of makes him sad at the same time. Anyway, Tom came to him out of the picture and entered his dreams. He made a new background for him. Cutting and pasting a new existence for this man, dead some centuries now bought Tom a fresh feeling. He gave Joseph a house and a sublime background. Actually the background came from a photograph a friend loaned him, of Yosemite. Still it looked kind of like something Caspar Friedrich or what ever, maybe there is a David in there? would have taken. Then he reimagined his own background. Tom took to asking his friends how their background would look like in a film treatment. Lindsay said she would prefer stables, a boudoir and to be always running up and down staircases. Lucas asked to be placed in a corporate setting, foyers, lifts, women in suits. Everyone laughed because Lucas was kind of, not smart. Tom gave himself a nice urban setting, a humourous light bulb and a more adventurous personality. In his story he discovered a love for the country and, after popping some ecstasy, drove into the country. Leaving home he drove, into the night, out from his landscape, to a town called Mariposa. He landed in a forest that looked a lot like Josephs background. He hunted and, this is where the drugs and the light kicked in, he found Joseph. Actually, it’s a little unproven whether he found Joseph or not, but he found someone ‘cause he certainly got laid at this point. Tom never came out of the forest. He had climbed a hill, gone too high and that was that. Crazy? Lost? Found? Happy? All together now who could know? What constitutes missing? Toms world now was with Joseph, high and happy and fake, sure, but perhaps Tom had always been crazy. I miss Tom, I wish he could have broken up with me before he left, then I wouldn’t have been left hanging.

Joseph and Tom met in a small town, in the north of an exotic continent. They shared a bit of time together before Joseph told Tom to leave. Joseph would be starting a new community and he didn’t feel that Tom had the right value set, the right ideals. Tom disappeared away into the haze, tripping about here and there before finally settling down with a nice guy, in his home town. He wasn’t sad in the end about his time with Joseph, he just saw the time as one in which he had explored a darker part of his psyche, a place he was generally happy to leave alone these days. It turns out you can choose what you want, even if it meant life was superficial. Well, Toby gave him what he needed and that was not a gay socialists commune but it was a happy home. Tom came out of a very normal family, working divorced parents who treated him well. He felt they had behaved badly toward one another and in front of him but eventually he decided he was lucky to have met them. Toby reminded him of his father. He had wanted romance and adventure in his early twenties but it was too much. Scared and overly intimate after confrontations in numerous sticky situations, he had backed off from some strong emotions that veered dangerously close to the surface at times. One time, a bus conductor in London, he was on holidays, had made him cry by punching his ticket a particular way. What was it about particular actions that almost bought back his history? Toby never asked him why his eyes misted over and Tom often wondered if Toby even noticed. Tom dreamed of dumping Toby and driving off into the ether. He would drive and drive and eventually come to a forest. And there, deep down in the forest he would be quiet. He could sit and ponder. He could walk. A lot of ideas came to him when he walked. Tom could find serenity if only he could get away to the bush. It had saved him once. Being in the bush. Joseph had taken Tom away when he was feeling down and given him a sense of perspective. In the bush Tom would find another version of Joseph, one who was a little more in tune with people, people who didn’t join communes. But Tom was fairly certain that man wouldn’t exist, or at least, hadn’t existed for some time. Tom often wondered, if he did go searching for that man, would he continue to exist? He bought a car two weeks later.