Caricature of a Deity (Part One)

Part One

The unfortunate mark of true artistic genius, I think, is that many only achieve worldwide fame and recognition after they have died. Another indicator is madness, utter and insoluble. My name is Smithen Corbusier, and this is a story that should seem familiar to most.

Now then, my powers of recollection have never served me well in the business that I am in. People, in particular, their faces and their deeds don’t impress on my memory. I have a pocketbook for that, you see. They come in as fuzzy little descriptions of people I’m supposed to remember. If I’ve forgotten, I don’t frantically try to imagine what they look like before the meeting, I just train myself to look unsurprised at everything. If you have a pocketbook and some little acting ability, it’s easy to dupe the world into thinking you’re an art dealer.

Well, the truth is, lately I’ve been clinging to my memories. Wishing they were better trained to capture the moment I have now been set upon to recall. I’ve already been questioned endlessly by reporters, and to no effect! I have systematically refused to give details to anybody concerning the Punnett Painting. This is because I’m claiming rights to the story, as I was his one good friend in the entire world, not to mention sole witness of said “Creation of Undoing,” as the tabloids would have it. You know, that has a mythical ring to it, which is why I think I appreciate the phrase so much.

The fact is that John Punnett was a mythical creature. He had an aura of the fantastic and the improbable. It really did seem like an aura that he was projecting, sucking things from this world into his gravitation and spewing them out again bizarre and fascinating. He was like a dream character brought to life. For instance, he was known to carry a sharpened samurai sword, which he knew how to use quite well.

He was an autodidact, in every sense of the word. I would often find him drunkenly quick-drawing bottles in his back yard, shooting from the hip. His speed and motions were actually quite good, but his aim was terrible. This might have had something to do with the fact that all of his targets were empty whiskey bottles.

As you can tell, I recall John Punnett very well. He wasn’t just another person, he was a human being: a fascinating and implausible thing.

The first time I met John Punnett was one of those fuzzy recollections. Something I couldn’t recognize at the time, some ornamented bludgeon, distorted by the sudden crossing of my eyes as it smashed into my nose, sent me sprawling and unconscious. I awoke with a bib shaped bloodstain, thick across the front of my shirt. Then Punnett was nudging me with his foot, seeing that I was awake and lifting me to my feet. He then began slurring apologies to me with his back turned, waving a flippant wrist in my direction, his sword (that’s what it was, a genuine goddamn Japanese katana) swinging at his belt. He was a tall man and skinny as a pole, with a mess of dark hair on his head. It looked as though he had given up shaving entirely. I rose to my feet in a blind rage, but I remember several guests at the function holding me back from stomping his face in.

“That thing can cut through a human neck like butter,” a man by the name of Sivins informed me, his eyes wide with the knowledge. I thought that was a very strange thing for an accountant to be so sure of, but as it turned out, Punnett had shown up to the party early, with only an acceptable level of alcohol running through his veins. He had brought with him two bundles of bamboo stalks that had been soaked in a chest of water over night. This gave them, so he claimed, the exact consistency of a human neck, bone and all. And so after displaying his ability to slice through both of them in clean, lightning fast motions, he went on to give the memorable speech of the year.

“Now then, that in mind you are all about to have the privilege of being part of a great social experiment. The rules are simple; I’m going to mingle in this social gathering and attempt to drink until the social part of my brain shuts down. Keep in mind that when I’m drunk I don’t usually get through in one clean cut. The scientific community thanks you for your cooperation.”

Punnett was well known for his way of putting things. It was often crass and egotistical, but just as often it was filled with strange wisdoms, bordering on the mystical. However, regarding the rest of his speeches that night as his experiment was well underway, this was not the case.

Famous outbursts include:

“I’d out-fuck Heston on a space station.”

Or, after being told that he resembled Edward R. Murrow by some woman:

“You hairy knuckled Jesuit! I hope someone burns your uterus down! If your spawn ever survive the fourth dimension I’ll hunt them down and lacquer their tongues!”

I never found out why he had such a big problem with this statement. Murrow is a respectable person to be compared with. And he really did resemble him, around the eyes.

Fortunately the police did show up, somebody must have called them. They ended up tasing him until he stopped moving, even though I really don’t think he was in any state to be fighting them off. Afterwards the party was just not the same. Anything Punnett put his hands on was never really the same afterward.

Obviously I did not really meet John Punnett that night; I merely stood by just like everybody else, admiring him in horror. I have no doubt this was how he preferred to be perceived. Many, I think would call the stunts he pulled symptoms of some sort of messianic complex. But he never once claimed to be a prophet. He never tried to save people, except perhaps through his paintings. And he wasn’t interested in saving people’s souls, just their sight. He wanted people to see things the way he did. I would eventually come to find that this way of seeing was almost as wonderful as it was dangerous.

I finally saw one of Punnett’s paintings a couple of weeks later. A man by the name of Conrad Shorewood had traded him a couple of six-shooters for it, apparently. I didn’t really feel the need to probe the circumstances. And good God, was this ever the most attention grabbing painting I had seen. The piece was called Plato’s Cave with a subtitle of: The Empire Never Ended. Here’s a quick description:

There’s a mural of projections on a cave wall. The outer circle consists of five different scenes: a toddler joyously kicking around a red ball: a soldier gutting another soldier with a bayonet in the trenches: a beautiful sprawling cityscape glistening like a diamond: a nuclear explosion populated by dancing exaggerated human silhouettes: - a man in full space suit, mid-bounce playing a fiddle on the moon. There is a center picture amidst all this, and it is a depiction of the artist pointing furiously at a mirror, the reflection is that of an ape pointing a crooked finger back at the artist and laughing with its head thrown back, the other hand clasped over its eyes. The foreground shows a hollowed out human brain with the back removed and a fire constructed inside of it. It’s being used as a projector, and an outlandish bio-mechanical creature of Lovecraftian inspiration wearing ceremonial robes is using a mass of writhing tentacles to create shadow puppets.

Being a man of no talent myself, I’ve always clung to my ability to recognize good art when I see it. I admit, I am a predator of the worst variety: I take the two things I’m good at, appreciating art and making business deals, and I make a living out of these two seemingly opposing skills. A good artist is almost always socially crippled in one way or another, that’s why men like me exist. So we can leech off of their talents for no other reason than having been busy building fake personalities while they were off plumbing the depths of their souls. Well, with Punnett things never turned out the way they were planned. In fact he was something of a terrorist toward every day structured existence. This I must have missed through willful ignorance, when I set up our first meeting with dollar signs in my eyes.

The address given to me by Shorewood gave me some trouble at first. I kept coming up to this church, at which point the address number I was looking for would be skipped. Finally I pulled into the church parking lot and tried to find someone to speak with. I eventually spotted the neighbor from across the road, out checking his mail. I waved him down and dodged traffic to get at him.

“Hello there,” I said, winded from my game of live action Frogger. “I’m Smithen Corbusier, I’m looking for the John Punnett residence.”

The man was one of those bumbling, middle-folk types. He rambled like a man not used to being acknowledged: “Oh, gee, how do ya, Smithen? I’m Mark, you’re lookin’ for Punnett?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Huh, don’t know why you’d want to see him. But he’s over there.” He pointed to a small building off to one side of the church, seemingly still on church property.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It was the Sunday School. Now it’s Punnett’s studio,” he said, shaking his head sadly.

“Odd. Well, thank you, sir.”

“No sweat, bud.”

I was more than a little leery, knocking on Punnett’s front door. The last time we had encountered one another, he broke my nose. However, the man who answered the door vaguely even resembled the man I had met at the party. He was clean-shaven and looked a lot younger. He seemed lacking in the wild spirit of before, and almost reeked of compunction.

“John Punnett?”

“Yuh.”

“The painter?”

“The legend.” He sounded defeated.

“I’m Smithen Corbusier.” I extended my hand, offering my best salesman smile.

“I’ve already got Jesus in here. He’s hiding in the bathroom. You people are really starting to stress him out,” he said with wearied exasperation, and then slammed the door in my face. I was flabbergasted.

What could I do? I knocked again. This time when he opened the door he stared at me like I was a bug. Then he squinted his eyes and really studied me for the first time.

“You represent the wealthy?” he asked.

I replied cheerfully, “Yes, how did you know?”

“You’re fat and you carry a pocket watch.”

“Oh,” I stumbled--that wasn’t part of the pitch. “Well, I’ve seen your work. I own a gallery downtown. I want to pay you to display your work.”

“Everyone has their uses, come in.”

“Thank you.”

“You came at the right time,” he said to me as I stooped into the doorway, removing my hat. “I’ll admit I’ve been a little hard up lately.”

Punnett’s studio brought back images of the Spanish Inquisition so vivid that he might as well have been a survivor. Nearly all of the paintings on the wall were crooked; this was done intentionally from what I can gather. The only pictures that were straight were the ones that were in places that the mind’s eye didn’t easily fall upon, so that though the eyes may scan over them a hundred times, it’s almost never noticed. This, I can tell you was John’s absolute intention. He constantly amused himself by the everyday invisible, that is, things people have trained themselves not to see. As a painter this was one of his favorite techniques.

“You train yourself to view the world peripherally,” he would often preach, “Let the center focus of the eyes wither and die. Viewing things dead on is a sure fire way to miss ninety percent of what’s really happening. You train yourself to see things out of the corners of your eyes, indirectly, because this is where the all the phantoms of the world hide.”

“This was a Sunday School wasn’t it?” I asked, not tearing my eyes from the various paintings. They described worlds that normal men never even caught glimpses of. I was already looking for the premiere piece the moment I entered.

“It sure was,” he sighed. He plopped himself on a radiator, folded his arms and stared at the ground.

“How did you obtain the property?” I examined a painting closely. It depicted a man-sized tapeworm, busy at the easel. It was painting a caricature of all the supposed Gods on their mountains, naked, playing their games and sipping tea. They were bubbly and cherubic and their genitals glistened like candy. Off to the side and at the tapeworm‘s back was the artist’s skin, occupying a good chunk of foreground. It seemed to have been discarded like a suit. The eyes were hollow, and the mouth was a gaping hole, presumably wide enough for a man-sized tapeworm to crawl out of. I got so lost in the minute details of this one painting that I didn’t catch his response.

I straightened up and brushed the front lapel of my jacket, “I’m terribly sorry, what did you say?”

“I said I convinced the children to stop believing in God. One by one. It took several weeks and I nearly ran out of LSD, but shit I was committed.”

I stared at him blankly and swallowed. He eyed me with complete seriousness and so rather than trying to decide if he was serious or not, I turned back to the painting. “What’s this one called?”

“Cutting Out the Middle Man.”

“Well, that’s rather prosaic.”

“I’m a painter, not a poet.”

“You’re a poet with paint. Can I take this one if I change the title?”

“No.”

“I’ll take this one.”

“Sixty-bucks.”

I laughed out loud and he cocked a quizzical eyebrow at me. “Look here,” I handed him two-hundred dollars out of my own wallet and said to him, “This can fetch at least three thousand at my gallery, I’ll take a cut plus the two-hundred, which I consider a deposit, and that will leave you in the quadruple digits.”

“Oh,” he said, and he almost smiled. “Well, hot shit.”

And that my friends, was the start of a beautiful relationship.