Free A Little Trouble with the Facts by Nina Siegal Page B

special for you,” he said. He rolled up a bill and held it to my nose. “Nice and easy. Nice and slow.”
    I did it his way and won some praise. “Fast learner,” said someone, as my schoolmarm’s tapping got louder. Jeremiah seemed to be proud of his new student. After I tried a second line, my schoolmarm had resorted to SOS in Morse code. There wasn’t too much left on the mirror now, but Jeremiah said, “Shoot the works, baby. The rest of it’s yours.” I decided I could ignore the code, just this once.
    And so, after Ilin Fischy’s genius party, I let Jeremiah put me in the back of his Lincoln Town Car. It went north this time, toward the cherry-wood doors of his Sixty-third Street town house. The first three floors were musty, decorated in various shades of brown and maroon: velvet club chairs draped with chenille throws, a lot of empty crystal vases. Scattered about the walls, in the appropriate nooks, were landscape paintings and still lifes of plums and pears. “My grandmother’s,” he said, as if it needed saying.
    “I don’t spend any time down here,” he said, leading me upstairs. “There’s only one floor that’s really mine; it’s really where I live.”
    The fourth floor was practically a Hammacher Schlemmer showroom. A life-sized replica of R2-D2, complete with remote. An antique pinball game and a foosball table—original, circa 1976. A tower of high-end electronics and two subwoofers shaped like trucks. And then there was lots of Pop Art. Behind the taxi-yellow leather couch was a series of photographs of teenage boys captured in 1980s bar mitzvah glory, each in a multicolored rococo frame. “I got those at the Armory show early this year,” said Jeremiah. “A really cool artist named something-Marti. He’s going to be a superstar.”
    He walked me over to a giant abstraction that looked like a blue Rorschach blot. “Elephant art,” he said. “These two New York artists give elephants paint brushes and let them go at the canvas. Amazing, huh?” Above the fireplace mantle was an enormous orange silkscreen that was unmistakably Warhol: a mangled car wrapped around a tree. The driver still in the wreckage, the body curled over the steering wheel.
    “My newest acquisition,” Jeremiah said, striding to the fireplace. “It’s from his death and disaster series. I picked it up at Sotheby’s in May. It depicts the American dream turned nightmare. The car is our emblem of progress, the industrial revolution, America’s most generic status symbol, and it’s all wreckage.” Jeremiah poured the contents of his plastic bag onto the coffee table and started shaping it into smaller mountains of dust. “At least that’s what the auction catalog said.”
    I walked toward the Warhol, drawn by the repeating image of the driver crushed behind the steering wheel. The car was completely mangled, ruptured, and yet there was something peaceful about the way the body was just slumped there.
    “It’s hard to look away, right?” said Jeremiah. “Sort of like pornography.”
    “Pricey pornography,” I said.
    “But at least with this one I can be sure I’m not going tolose money. Not that I’d ever sell this baby. But the others”—he shrugged—“you don’t know. Elephant art could be dead in a year. Or it could be worth millions. Here, let me show you something.”
    He took my hand again and led me upstairs, into the attic, where he kept what looked like about a thousand canvases, all pressed against one another. He started flipping through them, one after another. “A collector has to be willing to make mistakes,” he said, showing me one work after the next, the way Jay Gatsby tossed his silk shirts on the bed for Daisy Buchanan. “These are mine.”
    In the dim light, all the colors were shades of gray but I knew these were colorful paintings, post-Warholian, 1980s retro-kitsch, though I suspected he bought them when they still seemed cutting edge. Pop Art turned on a spin