Free Drowning Lessons by Peter Selgin Page B

haven’t known many painters; I grew up in Hollywood. But it’s a sure bet most don’t mix colors the way Picasso does, the brush a blur as it gathers pigments from light to dark, blending them with a deft twist of his wrist, but never thoroughly.
    â€œThe real mixing,” Picasso says, tapping his temple, “occurs here. But you know that, don’t you, Maestro?”
    Picasso calls me “Maestro.” At first I assumed that he was calling me Monstro, after the whale in Pinocchio — a crude joke, given my weight. But the real joke is that I am the farthest thing from an artist. I sell shoes for a living, or used to. I had my own store on Gower Street:
Cancellation Shoes, Brands You Can Trust at Prices You Can Afford
. Except for measuring feet, I have no talent (as it is I relied heavily on the Brannock device).
    Picasso disagrees. He’s seen my napkin sketches and says I have potential. “You have a gift for caricature, Maestro,” he told me over a Howard Johnson’s breakfast yesterday. “The great ones were all caricaturists. Van Gogh, Daumier, Rembrandt, Da Vinci … A good line should carry not only the form but an opinion about the form.”
    We tear ourselves from the latest swatch of scenery and drive off, my boss singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” at the top of his considerable lungs, getting the lyrics all wrong. As a countermeasure I belt Maurice Chevalier songs in my abysmal French, memorized from scratchy albums my dad would play on the Victrola in his bedroom studio while trying mightily to trace Donald Duck’s contours to Mr. Disney’s specifications.
    The sun breaks through clouds. I have only a vague notion where we’re going, gained at the top of our journey as we pulled out of the used-car lot on La Brea, where, after days of searching, we discovered our less-than-ideal method of transport under a butter-colored tarp. The Topolino needed only a fresh battery and lubrication. With the top down (it leaks anyway) and the painter of
The Family of Saltimbanques
holding an umbrella over our heads in heavy traffic, I was supplied with the rudiments of our mission, something about an expatriate saint living in a monastery above the equator and below the third parallel, a Sister Maria del Something-or-Other, who once performed on Broadway in her own musical review. This, of course, was before she renounced showbiz, joined the Order of Our Lady of the Andes (a Carmelite order), conceived immaculately, and lost one or both of her legs to a mountain lion — or was it a
Puma concolor
?
    Picasso couldn’t be sure.
    Since then I’ve been wary of asking questions. Know your place, Son, my father — who could not color or trace within the lines — told me, his only child, always. And I took his advice, genuflecting before my store patrons day by day, applying their knobby, stinking, swollen feet to Mr. Brannock’s gauge, squeezing the places where toes should and shouldn’t be.
    Between song numbers Picasso urges us onward, saying, “Forward, forward! Más allá! Andale!” We leave San Gabriel’s mountains behind and make for Joshua Tree National Monument — fine with me, a sucker for deserts, especially one with trees out of the funny pages. Sometimes I think my dad went into animation just to please me, his cartoon-loving son. If not for my love of
Popeye
and the
Toonerville Trolley,
he might have madea fine carpenter or dentist, or unleashed himself completely and gone abstract, or expressionist — or both. But he wished to please me, his fat boy, to make me happy. Is it any wonder I blame myself for his literal downfall, tumbling back-first down the stairs to my storage room under an armload of shoes?
    â€œYou should paint a picture,” says Picasso. “You could call it ‘Father Descending a Staircase.’”
    For Picasso the desert is a toy store, burlesque show, and