My old friend and the day he left...

Kill Mathew Barney by Jock McFadyen

I knew my friend David had once lived in Boston; it was one of those David-facts I filed away, like knowing how he tossed empty Styrofoam cups into the back of his car, until they boiled up over the seat. The how and the why of his being in Boston was something I didn't know. Probably I'd be just as ignorant today, if James McGarrell hadn't come to the University of Iowa. The university's scrawny painting and drawing faculty was fleshed out through guest artists, which is how McGarrell wound up there, scheduled for a talk.

Whenever there was a lecture, David and I always went. McGarrell was a figurative artist, whose work I knew and wasn't nuts about but then, I was abstract painter and an unforgivng one. Slouching into the auditorium that night, I settled in next to David, prepared for a dull hour. However, McGarrell knocked everyone's socks off, showing slides of paintings, all beautifully structured, with perfectly placed light and shadow. Even then, he was quite famous and, it turned out, he was also darkly good-looking, tweedily well-dressed, articulate, funny, and down to earth. It was unfair that heaven's bounty had been showered on just one guy, but by the end of the lecture I was madly in love with James McGarrell, along with most of the audience.

Afterwards, during our usual post-lecture coffee, David casually mentioned he'd met McGarrell at Ohio, during his MFA work. "You met him?" I squealed. "I never knew that. Did he like your work? What did he say to you?"

"He liked my work a lot," David said. "So I asked him what I should do, meaning with my whole life. I don't think he understood that's what I was really asking. Anyhow, he said I should go to Boston." David paused, and took a slurp of coffee. "He didn't give me any reason. I think Boston just popped into his head, and he told me to go. So I went."

"Just like that?" I asked. "You just went?" I was quietly impressed. Wow. How could you just go? I wondered, without a thought or a plan. That was Jack Kerouac territory.

Indeed. David just went. He drove to Boston at the end of the year, with his MFA, cloudy McGarrell-inspired hopes, and as much forethought as he could muster. Through a bulletin board or a newspaper ad, he'd arranged to share an apartment on Beacon Hill. Since he didn't know anything about Boston, he was ignorant of precisely how hurtfully high the rent would be, and that there would be no legal parking within miles. He'd never met his roommate either, who would turn out to be a slick-haired financial manager, one who was making a hefty salary and schemed to keep more of it: hence his desire to split the rent.

All David needed was a job, and he got one, working at a small unprofitable greeting card company. Tiny, cheerless and unprofitable though the company was, it delusionally viewed itself as direct competition to Hallmark. To this end, each employee specialized in a particular type of Hallmarkesque card: sappy condolence/birthday cards with floral bouquets rendered in drooly watercolor, kiddie birthday cards showing a kiddie clutching a giant number over his cute pot-bellied nakedness, fakey 19th century scenes of jolly coachmen and hounds that were cranked out for Christmas.

Of course, David was assigned the naked kid card.

His boss explained that for reasons of taste and propriety, the tot's nakedness was to be hidden by an immense number, signifying the birthday child's age. Since the company was poor, obviously it couldn't put out a separate boy and girl card, so David was instructed to paint a little androgen, who could be taken for either. Again, because the company was three steps from bankruptcy, it couldn't offer separate cards for little black, Hispanic, or Asian children. Still, the company was sensitive to race...and so David was told to shade his little androgynous tyke a tasteful coffee color, and to keep the hair and eyes a medium brown.

Off to one side, where David sat, were three twittering old ladies who painted the drooly watercolor cards and wrote the idiot verses inside. In order to sharpen their writing skills, one night a week, the biddies attended Robert Lowell's poetry workshops at Harvard to no obvious benefit. On David's other side, hunched the man David bitterly envied. He too was quite old, but he was allowed to render The Big Christmas Card. This was the fakey 19th century scene, complete with drifts of snow, stamping horses, shiny coach, jolly horn-tooting coachmen, red-faced burghers offering steamy tankards of cheer, excited swirling dogs etc. etc. And while it was a stupid and banal card, at least it was a complex one, and no toast-colored androgens were required.

And, David quickly learned, the card company paid next to nothing.

So, for the next year, David wandered out to his car each morning, peeling off the illegal-parking ticket he'd been given the night before; then he'd drive to his soul-killing job, and paint a little tan boy/girl mix for the next eight hours. After work, he'd stop on a street corner and panhandle passers-by, unleashing a volley of abuse. Once he'd begged for loose change, he'd cut through the Parker House restaurant, stealing rolls out of the bread baskets as he went. Even with the change and swiped bread, he wasn't making it.

And, back at the apartment, each night his fat-cat roommate would say, "If I'd only known you couldn't carry your weight...I gotta have someone who can pay his part of the goddamn rent."

The only friend he made was a girl about his age, who worked at the card factory too. She was a rich kid, whose bewildered dad had opened an account for her at a gourmet specialty shop. "She loved hors d'oerves," David said. "When she had me over for dinner, that's all we'd have, ordered from that shop. She'd eat something off a little piece of toast and say, 'Isn't this good?'" Privately I thought of my own weird friend, the one who ate salad with her hands.

By the end of that year, he told me, he owed $7500 in parking tickets.

"So what did you finally do?" I asked, morbidly fascinated.

"Well, one night I was lying in bed, and I thought, I can just leave... It hadn't occurred to me. I thought I had to stay and make everything work out, but I realized I couldn't. I'd just gotten promoted too. The old guy, the one who did The Big Christmas Card, died doing overtime, and they gave it to me. But I still wouldn't make enough money. I'd never make enough money there. So I got into my car in the dead of night and left. I never wrote the card company to resign, never wrote my roommate. I ran away."

"Damn," I said. It was quite a story. "Good for you," I added, and meant it. A useful bit of knowledge, I thought. One I might have occasion to use: Just leave.

"Yeah," David said, "It was the right thing to do. Of course, I can't go back to Boston for five more years. The parking ticket thing. That's when the statute of limitations is up. But that's okay, I can live with it."

"Hey," I said, "who needs to go to Boston anyway?"