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I saw Kathy pushing that monster of hers in a red Stroller. I hadn’t seen her in a long time and like an idiot I waved to her and she turned the stroller on a dime and charged across the street, with her kid out front pointing at me like a rhino’s horn. No: “Hello, how do you do” from an old Kathy. She just lit right into me, “What the fuck is wrong with your friend Ivan?”

“Ivan? Nothing. He passed the bar… moved back into Manhattan. You know, he got that job… ironically, he’s turning out to be the only one of us who’ll make any money… so much for saving the world..”

“That’s not what I mean and you fucking know it. Why is Ivan Sending Two dozen roses to my house on Valentines Day?”

“He actually got up the nerve,” I said under my breath.

“Some Nerve,” she said.

“Ivan came out for lunch last week and we saw” (and the kid’s name fell out of my head, because I always called it the little monster to every and anyone, but Kathy… the kid was a screaming terror who even in his present state of sleepy, slack jawed drooling, was only storing energy for his next violent fit)…”We saw YOUR CHILD,” I offered. “With his nanny. Ivan was quite smitten by her. You know how he always loved French girls.”

“Marguerite? She’s not fucking French. She’s Haitian.”

“Well she speaks French,” I said. “She has that charming patois… and let’s face it… She’s soft on the eyes.”

I found myself speaking like I was stuck at the turn of the century… I mean the last one. I can never talk to women and especially mothers in my own voice.

“Well that explains why the card was in French,” Kathy muttered and I could see her storing the energy up for her own fit. I got nervous and fished in my coat for the cigarette I’d bummed from Danny two days ago. It was bent and shedding its innards, but I lit it and smoked like a man on the proverbial firing line. I remembered now why I was out of touch with Kathy.

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We ran into Teddy Blowshardly outside the bar where he gave off the immediate perfume of beer and tobacco. We hadn’t seen him since his old band, Power Sander played The Continental. We were just going to nod and walk by when he offered up a pack of Dunhill Red cigarettes and we each took one even though we’d both quit smoking. Teddy had never been a generous sort and it seemed we should grab it while the grabbing was good. We lit up and stood there in a triangle when Teddy went off on a lecture about the inequity of the bass.

The cigarette tasted good and I looked over at Treadwell and he looked at me and Teddy went off on how the bass contained the melody and the rhythm of a song and could act as a bridge to both. He was saying something about chords and notes and that if you played a different root note in bass it chould change the whole sound of a chord…. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but Treadwell told me later that it was all very basic stuff. Teddy tried to draw in the air a magical line between Mingus and McCartney and Jaco Pastorius… something about harmonics and the pop song and he said, “The joke is that the bass is the most important instrument and most schlubs can’t even hear it. Fuckin’singer gets all the attention.”

He went on talking about aspects of the bass and unsung bass players untill the cigarettes ran out. He offered to buy us a beer inside, but we told him we had to get going… neither of us wanted to hear more about the bass.

“Geez he’s gained weight,” Treadwell said.

“Yeah, he’s really hit bottom, ” I said.

“Ha ha,” Treadwell said. “I thought he played piano?”

“And sings a little,” I said.

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I’m in a cycle of reworking drawings from the year that never quite felt right. The above was a background for an early gif experiment here

I went out into the parking lot with two papier maché puppets on my hands (his and hers). I found the dog panting in the back seat of the convertible. I tried to pet her, but couldn’t due to the over size puppet heads and then the flies showed up and I was thinking that the dog must’ve crapped in the back of the car. The flies circled the dog’s head and landed in her ears and there were suddenly a lot of them and they crawled into her ears and down into her head and you could see her skin buckle and shift as the insects crawled deeper and in greater numbers into her sweet, innocent head.

The dog promptly threw up on me and her vomit was the color of an oil slick, which is to say no color at all, but every color. When I looked closer I could see that she’d vomited little chips and electronic devices that looked like enlarged viruses. I had to go back into the museum.

It had been built in the shape of a large metallic cow dropping… the Swiss-Indian architect from Texas had meant it as a joke on “Sacred Cows”. It had been controversial and was oddly beautiful and there were no hard edges after the door. It was a completely biologically (scatologically) shaped building. However, the art inside was an installation which painfully reproduced a Victorian library (They’d built a classical building inside the enormous turd dome) complete with classical busts, leather chairs, wooden tables and leather bound books on the shelves and one of those ladders on tracks to reach the books high up in the stacks. The art consisted of a team of performers sitting around the library reading and shooshing anyone who talked. They were dressed more or less like a bunch of Princeton students circa. 1953. The only thing odd was that one guy was all tricked out in green body makeup with a red afro and posthetic makeup that made him look quite freaky with bulging eyes. he was spinning records with two turntables, but he was listening to it with headphones,so the library remained dead silent.

I spent the better part of the show trying to get the performers to break character and talk to me. They were like British Royal Guards. I kept insisting that there was no point in doing a show like this unless the audience could participate and I was playing the crazy unwashed guy who talks to himself at the library and demands conflict. “I want to know what’s going on here,” I kept insisting. Eventually I pissed them off so much that they all relented and we started talking about art and drinking wine and having a good time. I don’t know what happened to the dog.

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Sometimes I wonder what is left to see after Picasso saw what is left to see, etc.
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Bud walked by and looked at the ladies as they looked back at him and I looked down and he said under his breath, “The thing about Mommies is, you know they’ve fucked at least once.”

“You’re a sick man,” I said and then I peeked at them looking at us and their suspicious eyes seemed to half close in arousal and extacy. I couldn’t see them the same way anymore. By force of Bud’s words, I had to imagine sleeping with them and with it their kids in the other room and a whole Oedipus play.

“You talk too much,” I said.

“Like I was saying…” Bud went on.