Part Two
A week later Cutting Out the Middle Man sold for thirty six hundred, and I found myself paying Punnett another visit. The man who answered the door this time was the first Punnett I had met. He was wild eyed and unshaven, and his fingers were covered in paint and gunpowder. It appeared that he had been drinking the entire time I’d been away, and he looked me up and down suspiciously, as if we had never met. Before he had a chance to open his mouth I presented him with the check.
“Hot damn, you didn’t jip me. And I thought I was jipping you! Come in Smithley I have a painting to show you.” He was hollering at me like a Texan. I entered to be polite, and didn’t even correct him on my name.
The studio was in turmoil, there were broken bottles, spent paints and all manner of canvases cut to shreds on the floor. There was a stack of unsheathed records next to a hastily set-up record player, and some sort of gypsy heavy metal coming from the single speaker.
Punnett was excited, almost manic; certainly drunk. He paced feverishly to a painting on the easel in the center of the room. “This, is Liberty on a Stick.”
I stepped cautiously around the junk and peered closely at it. “That’s a much better title than the last,” I said, looking up at him and smirking. He seemed horrified at what I said, and I didn’t know why. I cleared my throat and looked at the picture again.
There was a fireworks display covering the top half of the painting in eerie shades of green and purple. Children’s faces looked up, illuminated in unsettling demonic glee. A line of children in full riot gear stood to the side holding automatic weapons.
Uncle Sams were everywhere throughout the crowd, handing out caramel covered guns and patting the children lovingly on the head. One could be seen on the right side giving the youngsters barcode tattoos at a face painting kiosk. A rather gruesome scene appeared on the opposite side of the painting of a hanged man with a sack over his head. Blind folded children were using bayonets on his body like a piñata. The moment was captured just as he split open and his entrails spilled into the scurrying hands of four ecstatic children. An Uncle Sam was there too, bent over with his hands on his knees. He had a wide eyed expression best compared to something a father would give his son in the Saturday Evening Post, his mouth an almost a perfect “O.”
Looking closely at the moon in the sky I could see the shadow of a zeppelin with its bay doors open, spilling thousands of tiny slips of paper to the ground below. A closer look at the foreground showed a little girl holding on of these slips of paper. It said: “American Freedom, recently voted best in national taste test!”
And above all of this madness was the clincher. It was an American flag, covering an entire fourth of the painting and it was simply breathtaking. It would have belonged in a museum, except… it was melting. It was melting and it was quite chilling, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off of the artistry.
“Why do the children look so evil?” I asked.
“They’re celebrating battle. This is how people should look when they watch simulated bombs explode over their heads.”
“That flag! How did you do it?”
“Well, I was feeling exceptionally masochistic that day, so I decided to paint the most magnificent flag I have ever painted or ever will. It took about four hours of painstaking detailing.”
“I see, and so what about that effect?”
“Well here’s the kicker. After painting that disgustingly beautiful, absolutely breathtaking masterpiece, I pissed on it.”
“I don’t follow.”
“No really: I drank a job-well-done bottle of Wild Turkey and laughed maniacally as I drenched that monument to American nationalism in my stink juices.”
“Well… while I can’t agree with your methods, you seem to have hit the effect you were going for right on the head.”
“Actually I was just doing it for fun, but I see what you’re saying; it turned out fairly badass.
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to have to see what other things my pee can increase the value of.”
“Hmm.” Many things that Punnett said, there was simply no response for.
“Come on, you’re drinking with me tonight.” He punched at my arm. It actually kind of hurt.
“Oh no, I couldn’t. Let me take this off your hands,” I said as politely as I could.
“Come on, it’s Friday.”
“No really…”
“I’ll throw in a whole other painting for free.”
My weakness is that I’m too shrewd. Drinking with Punnett sounded like a horrible idea, but a painting with a one-hundred percent take for me sounded like a great idea. “Deal,” I said. I extended my hand to seal the deal and he handed me a bottle of whiskey.
And so the night wore on and I drank some of his whiskey on the rocks, and he matched me three shots for every one, but throughout he maintained a level of civility that astonished me. It made me shudder to think how much he had drank that night when he bludgeoned me in the nose.
He was surprisingly charming and hilarious. We talked about science and religion, art and literature, but when I tried to bring up politics he had this to say: “Kindly shut your fucking mouth right now,” and then he went right back to being charming and hilarious.
His view on art was quite unique:
“Say you spread a rumor about a famous person. Like, ‘Magic Johnson has an inside-out asshole.’ Spread it vehemently and attack the denouncers. Lie like a fucking madman; invent sources that can’t be traced. Spread this lie so far and wide and deep that the growing stress and pressures of defending himself causes Magic Johnson to have a hernia.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Life imitates art.”
“Well I always thought it was the other way around.”
“What?”
“Art imitates life.”
“Life cannot be imitated. It can only be emulated. You must make changes to life in order to imitate the artistic vision in your head.”
“What’s the sense in that?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one trying to make sense of it. I just do fucking illogical things because they suit me. Tell me Smithen; is my mind just another work of art to you?”
“Yes.”
“Why? What’s ideal about madness?”
“Madness is just another word for those perceptions we are either too indifferent or too scared to try to understand. Yours may be strange and frightening, but it is also fascinating, and beautiful.”
“Whoa; my inner depths in four adjectives or less, chums up Corbusier, we’re going to drink ourselves to Hell and stiff the devil with the bill!”
The only subject we got into a bit of a spat about was music. I simply did not like classical music, and this seemed to crush his soul. He insisted on putting in Rachmaninoff, and throughout the whole first movement he kept trying to glean some appreciation out of me. I kept shrugging my shoulders and asking, “Where are the drums?”
Eventually he stopped the record, flipped it and held the needle a few inches above.
“Ok, try this on. You like stories right?”
“Well, yes, doesn’t everybody?”
“Every time you listen to this stuff it tells a different story. And the more you listen to it, the deeper the stories get; the more you fall in love with the characters. Motives become clearer, quarrels become murkier, because this time the morality is ambiguous.” He let the needle drop. A hesitant piano began its monologue, strings began to swell.
“Ok, so what story does this one tell you right now?” I asked him, with a certain crowning enthusiasm, but it was clear that he was already not listening to me. His eyes had glazed over and he was falling into the music.
“This is the story of a man who goes into the jungle. You hear the piano, faltering in its supposed happiness; the strings coalesce into a kind of dread. This is him waving goodbye to his family with a heavy hand on his heart. He goes knowing that when he gets there he will no longer be among the living. He will not be among the dead either. Instead he will be among the killing.
“The only way to delay the transition between killing and dying is to enjoy one’s work.” He continued over the ever progressing melody in an unnerving monotone. “This hectic little crescendo you hear is the maddening relief he feels in the revelation. Here—you may not hear it right out—he is setting men on fire in their beds. It comes across as more of a satisfaction in the song than anything else.
“Ah, and here we have the death of a friend. There is tragedy, there is dignity, and here the whole orchestra goes nearly silent, but for that dissonant low swelling of the strings, which is the onset of vengeful bloodlust.
“And here! Where the entire orchestra is at its loudest, most beautiful; this is where he is behind a truck gun-mount and has stopped discerning between man woman and child.”
Following the tremendous crescendo, the entire orchestra went silent, leaving only the low static of the needle running across empty record, and the sound of blood pumping through my ears behind my own baited breath. Punnett continued over the noise, his voice taking on a frightening, subdued tone.
“Static… is what he hears when the bombs stop exploding around his head. He returns to his family, and his face is frightening to the children. He can no longer look at anyone without the thought of killing them crossing his mind. Its clear that the hooded figure that stood at his shoulder during the war has come home with him; certain he’ll keep the souls coming.”
The needle lifted. And Punnett continued to stare off into distance, lost in another world. I tried to think of something to say, but he spoke up again before I could.
“I actually saw that specter,” He said. “When I was a kid.” He finally looked up and I saw the first inch of doubt I had ever seen cross his face. It was then that I realized that the story he told had been a personal one. “It’s a catch-22 when you know you’re crazy, right?”
“I think…” I stopped to think out a proper response. “I think knowing that you’re crazy puts you ahead of the game… you know; over the ones who pretend such things don’t exist.”
His eyes softened, and he smiled that boyish smile of his. “You know, Corbusier, I like the cut of your jib.”
Shortly after that I had to gather up my paintings and stumble towards the door. Leading up to that point, Punnett had begun to fall farther and farther into himself. I would mention something to him and he would snort, or simply not respond. As I left and looked back at him, he seemed to be exuding an aura of black, entrenching himself into some deep, dark places. He was becoming frightening.
“Take care, John,” I said hoarsely.
“Perhaps,” was all he said.
