Free Broken Sleep by Bruce Bauman Page B

other way ’round.”
    I worked the farm stand, but Dad got frustrated with me because I gave away free food to some and charged others too much. Donnie Boyle gave me a job at his diner as a waitress. I kept telling the customers what they should eat instead of what they wanted. I dropped dishes. Mostly by accident. DearArt did his best to cover for me or take the blame. Donnie’d had the hots for me forever and he never would have fired me, so I fired myself.
    I decided to do volunteer work as a kind of aide, going to the houses of the old and the sickly in the North Fork. I also painted, read, wrote in my notebooks, and discovered physics. That’s when I started to formulate my theories on emotions and gravity.
    Entranced by the tide and inhaling the smells of the Sound, hoping to find Kyle, her atom self, but no … I’ll tell you about that soon enough. That night I first understood the secrets of gravity, and the moon, and embraced the power of my acute sense of smell. My first shrink here, Samuel Sontag, who I nicknamed Count Shockula, thought I just made up these smells. I challenged him, “You don’t deny gravity, do you? Or its effects on the tides? Or on objects as small as atoms? What are smells but molecules floating in the air? And moon tides—gravity determines their motion. And people are seventy percent water, and have smells inside them that are affected by gravity. I call them soulsmells.” He just kept looking down and taking his notes.
    After incubating in Orient, I realized I had to leave or become an erased soul inside a physical shape pantomiming the motions of life. Or a lonely oddball wasting away like Art. Dad had told me about the trust Greta and Bickley Sr. set up for me. I decided to attend Parsons in New York. I thought life would be different. It wasn’t. I sport-fucked. Made very few friends. Parsons had a soulsmell of dried blood, moldy cork, and self-absorption.
    I went to see all of Greta’s films. I found books about her in the NYU library, which I later learned got so many things wrong. Yes, she left Hollywood after the perfectly titled
Two-Faced Woman
flopped both artistically and financially, which allowed her studio bosses to use it as a pretext to dump her lovely derriere, and her (to them) inequitable salary. The greed-gods leaked the vilifying “truth” that she’d suffered a nervous and physical breakdown, felt abused by those so magnanimous Hollywood employers. She planned to take one or two years off in New York City and return triumphantly to Hollywood. It wasn’t the war, her desire to be alone, even the movie mongrels that stopped her. It was an affair. Like all of Greta’s affairs, with both men and women, it was clandestine and doomed. Unlike all the others, this time, in 1943, she gave birth to a child. Me. She chose my name: Salome. And then she chose to give me away.
    I would go to her apartment and wait outside, and sometimes I saw her come out and get into a car. Or go for a walk. Few people recognized her. I never talked to her.
    For almost two years, I floated though my classes and explored the city. Through the recommendation of one of my professors, I found this small gallery. The gay owner loved my “look,” so he gave me my first show,
ARTillery
. After one of my weekly performances straddling one of the cannons, I met the Great and Powerful Horrwich and he invited me to his opening, and so I flitted into the Murray Gibbon Gallery up on 57th and Fifth. (He soon moved to SoHo and later Chelsea.) We consummated our lust-power attraction that night in the closet of the gallery. Soon after, I moved into his loft on PrinceStreet. He owned the whole damn building. The industrial plants still reigned like the dying kings of SoHo, unaware of their impending extinction, mighty buildings with soul and the energetic odor of toil and beer-injected muscles.
    Horrwich and I became a pair. I all but quit going to Parsons when we got to setting up the
Art Is