From Biofreak to Organasm, Part Two

An eyewitness account
by David Brody

Return to part one

[All four parts of this story are available in printed form from Pierogi gallery for $5—ed.]

Next day we met as planned at the fence. Lloyd unlocked a padlock, unsnaked a chain, and wheeled open a gate. The site was amazing, perfect for a sprawling, anarchic Disneyland of esemplastic vandalism. "Check out this structure!" yelled Sharon from across the yard. We trotted over. " It’s like a huge fucking barn. You could put a dozen installations in those stalls alone."

"Art-cows," said Lloyd. "Give us your art-cows, and we will make a runny, pustulant river of curdled butter."

"Wow," we all said. "Yum." And there was more: concrete blockhouses, enormous steel silos with attendant ladders, a huge central space with a 30-foot skylighted ceiling, and those cedar vats. From one of these, Lloyd scooped a handful of little yellow seeds and we gathered round. They had been there for ten or twenty years, the vats keeping them bone dry for a reckoning with grinders and vinegar that never came. They were as even and uniform in size as little ball bearings, not like seeds at all, and there were plenty of them. Millions, probably.

At length we adjourned to a nearby diner to talk about the lease and to set a schedule for cleanup. There were nine of us. Nobody else was there so we moved some tables together onto the end of a booth. As I listened with half an ear to the Augean construction tasks being proposed in breathless tones — not merely lighting and sound systems, but trapezes, wading pools, labyrinths — I reflected that most of the eight people surrounding me were energetic types. So there was no problem. I could tread water with minimal effort much of the time and be sucked along behind their draft.

"Well first of all, we’ll need to clean the place up. Let’s just start with that, then we can talk about ‘viral pathways,’" said Corey. He was tall, fair, handsome and decent, and all the more perfect, he was a stridently agitprop cartoonist with a paranoid style for the radical collective, DeathBreath Comix. Unlike most of those DeathBreath folks, though, he wasn’t the least bit obnoxious in person. In fact he had the kind of ready and likable laugh that would have made him electable as student council president, if he hadn’t been too cool for that sort of thing. Stand up guy that he was, Corey had been left holding the bag when Julius and his evil sidekick, Roth, had absconded with the funds and some of the furnishings from Skidmark, which was the most active of the storefront spaces in the hood. Among many other things, it had partially housed Cody’s and Gustave’s mechanized assemblage show, Biofreak. I’d performed there in a couple of my buddy Glen’s overlapping found dialogue plays, bits of overheard conversation combined with precociously jaded battle-of-the-sexes hostility, all of which ended in displays of fake blood or vomit; I’d shown my severe abstract film "Calculus" there at a festival to a medicinally overenthusiaistic audience; shit, I’d even met Lloyd at Skidmark, when I came to a Gulf War meeting with a large grisaille portrait of Colin Powell gesturing at a map of Iraq like a T.V. weatherman set above a text from a playmate of the month. The four star general was saying that he just wanted to "help people and be a positive person."

Now Skidmark was no more. And Julius and Roth were long gone, apparently using the grant money to buy studio time and set themselves up as white Hip Hop moguls. In a less criminal vein, they had likely been the ones responsible for religiously tearing down neighborhood posters of stuff they didn’t care for. In particular, they, or someone, had a vendetta against the more middlebrow efforts of the theater group I’d been associated with, and secretly I approved of this campaign against the humdrum, which also included heckling bad performance art and snoring loudly or walking out during tedious poetry readings. Someone had to do it. Otherwise you get just what we have now: an aura of politeness so paralyzing that it takes no balls at all to bogart a mike and waste other peoples’ time. Bad enough the perennial thickskinned dolt who knows no shame and couldn’t take a hint if it were coming from a flame thrower, but without the threat of humiliation you get also the sheltered and the precious. Nothing except a dose of awful self-consciousness can deter these delicate creatures, once they get going, from regarding their own tentative reflections, every zit a cauldron of fascinations. Julius and Roth were repugnant assholes but, like wolves picking off the weakest deer, they served a purpose.

Anyway, Corey and the rest of the board never saw the embezzlement coming, and no one had the heart to go on with Skidmark afterward. Corey tried his best to get the debts paid off but only so as to dissolve the corporation. Perhaps the place had served its purpose, like a mushroom that pops up entire the night after a rain and then slowly gives up its body to the forest. The Skidmark building was recently bought, speaking of rot, by a LLC from Marseilles and is being turned into "artist" lofts.

I could never figure out our Real Estate Mother. Sharon’s sexual and economic orientation were none of my affair. Her dad was some kind of lawyer yet she lived like a squatter in a rent-strike multiunit deep in the Southside, crack vials in her entryway and a sepulchral ambrosia of rice and beans in the hall. She would mention in passing her girlfriend one week and her boyfriend the next and I never presumed to know exactly what that meant. Her dad came into it because he helped out on the lease advice–– one in a long succession of freebies or shortcuts that Sharon knew about. "No problem. We can shag power from the streetlight on the corner. My friend Mitch, the squatter from Dublin?–– he’s an expert at patching into the grid." Or, "If you read the notices and see when a show closes you just show up with a pickup and there’s piles of flats in the street–– 2x4’s and 1/2 inch ply. That’s what we did for Spiderweb." There was always an angle. Sharon, like that playmate, like the chief of staff, was a positive person.

Once when I was visiting Sharon a movie was being shot on her block. Signs in Yiddish had been temporarily nailed up over the Spanish signs along Havemeyer. Underneath the Spanish signs, undoubtedly, were aboriginal Yiddish ones. (You can still make out some ghostly alephs and gimmels here and there, but memory plays tricks. I’m no longer sure if they were left over from the picturesque immigrant past or the movie of it.)

The production had also lined the street with ersatz El train staircases which ended, oh so symbolically, in nothing. Not three blocks away, however, perfectly actual stairways, scenically decrepit, led to lacey moiré overhead tracks, and upon these the JMZ lines still roared and rattled like a periodic Krakatoa, erupting cataclysmically but refusing to subside into the ocean of progress. Presumably, it was too noisy for shooting there, yet to wander around was to be transported onto the set of a black and white Forties noir. Richard Widmark, slats of light and shadow chopping across his face, lurked around the corner on Marcy smoking a cigarette. He had typhoid and didn’t know it. And if you walked a block farther south you’d find all the Yiddish signs you could want — as sepia-toned as an illegal sweatshop.

"Enjoyed the Attic" I said to Eric, sitting across the booth from me at the diner. The sun was warming my beer. "Medusa Siam was really on."

"Yeah, on something," volunteered Corey.

"Did you like it? What’d you think of the decor?" asked Eric, who was nursing a cup of genuine diner coffee, mean and forsaken, the sort you just can’t find in these parts anymore. He was of course the Dance Mother and could be counted on to round up a monster sound system and competent DJs who would mist, like the giddy ozone that had once been planned for the ventilation system of Radio City Music Hall (it’s true), an anonymous edgy groove over the whole proceedings, that is when no bands were playing. Eric had had a minor meteor of a painting career in the 80’s, showing once at a blue chip gallery and then snuffing out in the ionosphere. He never explained what happened but perhaps it was obvious that Eric was not the alone-in-the-studio type; if he couldn’t be an Art Star, he was going to be the guy behind the curtain, the hipster impresario with the moody beauty on his arm. For all that, he came off like a regular joe, not especially articulate but nobody’s fool. With his infallible radar for where the scene was trending, Eric staked out a claim in post-geek/pre-soccer mom cyberspace. After Organasm and a couple of basement clubs that came and went, his parties began to move online. Ever since, he’s discorporated himself more and more. When he no longer exists bodily, like a mantra, perhaps he will have achieved his goal.

"Yeah, did you like my projections? Weren’t they great in that space?" asked Lloyd, sitting on my right.

"Yes, yes, yes and yes," I answered. "Looked like a great crowd. They’re starting to come from all over."

"Shit. There were, like, all these, jesus . . . man, like these gorgeous Japanese girls there, real stylish. You know, from Japan."

"Did you take any of them up to your lair, Eric?" asked Sadie, with a sideways smile. Sadie was the Performance Mother.

"No. No. Not at all. No. Didn’t you know? I’m practically married now. Look but don’t touch."

"I know that feeling," threw out the Lighting Mother coolly with his cigarette exhale. But Antoine’s shit-eating grin turned instantly defensive as he glanced in Sadie’s direction, like a bad boy who knew he deserved to be hit. He raised the palms of his hands to shield himself in an exaggerated pantomime but it was hard not to notice that the initial cringe had not been voluntarily.

Sadie, motionless as Cleopatra, fixed him with a very serious looking mock glare. "Antoine!"

Antoine and Sadie were married, partly for immigration purposes. Once I’d called Sadie after being intrigued by her aloof snakecharmer’s curves at a party and she’d asked, flat out, "How did you get my number? You know I’m with Antoine, don’t you?" "Uh, yes," I said–– "I mean, no. I looked it up. You’re listed." And that was the end of that. But I guess she liked the attention, because almost immediately we morphed into friends, or rather, family–– conspiratorial mishpoke adrift together in a sea of innocent gentiles. We’d exchange looks at one of those interminable meetings and it was as if to say, What do these children really know about life? Someday they’ll have to get serious, but let’s not spoil their fun. I enjoyed pretending to be affected by her primordial tribal spell — we take what we can get — but the assimilative facts speak for themselves: I went to an Episcopal school and a Quaker summer camp. I bore the scars of Abraham, but that was it. I’d never even been Bar Mitzvahed.

Apropos of circumcision, I owned a drawing of Sadie’s of a disembodied set of testicles being exquisitely pierced with a huge needle wielded by a doll’s hands, a very fractured fairy tale. Once a Con Ed guy, tromping through my apartment, noticed it on my wall and got inappropriately inquisitive. "What the hell is that?" he wanted to know. "Whatever you want it to be," I parried carefully.

After Sadie split with Antoine, she and I went out, finally, for a drink. It turned out we had absolutely nothing to say to each other. Within a year or two she was wheeling around a baby, the glow of contentment radiating like a heatlamp. "Oh Ben, you’ve got to do it! It’s so great. It’ll change your life."

For his part, green card and, eventually, liquor license in hand, Antoine finally realized his American dream with the bar Zoloft. Japanese crews were taping at the opening, and French, German, and Scandinavian travel guides featured photo spreads of the circular terrarium and the mirror room within the year. Later, of course, the name had to be changed due to trademark infringement, but as Okay, Antoine’s empire just keeps growing: microhostel and spa, a rumor of franchises in Denmark and in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. At first, he seemed like an artist of entrepreneurship, a sweet utopian guy playing at being a businessman, but you wonder at what exact moment, like an optical illusion, it flips. I liked Zoloft, and even had my party there after my opening at Sauerkraut, though to be sure we could all see the handwriting on the wall. From the dysfunctional clubhouse atmosphere of the late-lamented Keelhauler House, with its free happy-hour coldcuts and its bonafide drunks, to the strategically lit elegance of Zoloft (Antoine’s lighting Motherhood had borne fruit), there was already a steep trajectory that said all that needed saying about naive bohemian open-mindedness. Or maybe not so naive. Now that I think about it, way back when the Keelhauler raised its Rolling Rock prices to three dollars a bottle we were all bitching that the end was near.

Don’t get me wrong — Zoloft was a welcome development, an oasis, ahead of the curve. Even now, I’ll take my dealer to Okay. She thinks it’s charmingly outerborough and she pays.

"Bottoms up," someone said and we drained our beers and coffees. Closing time. Clouds of greasy steam were hissing up from the grill where the cook poured water on it and scraped. It was only 5 pm but the earlybird factory workers still served here, an evaporating puddle, took their dinners at home. A jumbo dumpster would be delivered to the Organasm site in a week. Those of us who had the money agreed to throw in a few hundred bucks or so, which we might even get back from the box office, in order to secure the space and for liability. In retrospect, it’s astonishing that anyone would rent to us, much less insure us. We were called Organasm, after all. But Sharon — and her dad — knew how to talk to landlords with vacant property, of which there was such a plenitude back then that we could just about have gone ahead and used the place without anyone knowing. Hell, this guy they sweet talked might well have been hoping we’d burn the place down so he could collect. (If so, he missed out, but not by much.) As we left the diner I figured I might go back for a square cheeseburger sometime but I never got the chance. The owner, I was told by a friendly W.W.II vet who sat outside the VFW post on my block, had hit the Lotto one day and moved to Florida. "He left the bacon frying on the grill," said toothless Bob. I’m kind of glad Bob never lived to see the trattoria that eventually moved in. $20 will buy you four homemade ravioli on a huge plate with a sprig of dill. "Oh," the new owners must have said, "what an authentically greasy little place."

I haven’t mentioned the other two Mothers, Marco and Elaine, Construction and Materials. Marco worked with seriously crazy people and liked to give the impression that he was just a step from the ward himself, or a jail cell. He had kids but he seemed to have it worked out that he could stay out all night when he wanted, which was always. Elaine was an expert costumer. When a job came in she’d shut down Control, the performance space she ran with her ex, and fill it with sweet young things and sewing machines. With just the right amount of Twilight-Zone reverb, I read a long literary dream fantasia to a paying audience once at Control, a triumph, which I thought entitled me to free beer, but Elaine’s ex gave me such a sour look when I asked for a fourth that I didn’t enjoy that one so much. Nursing its begrudged suds, which began to taste like bile, it occurred to me for the first time that maybe I’d only bored everyone for twenty long minutes through an echoey fog. Lloyd, Corey, Sharon, Eric, Sadie, Antoine, Marco, and Elaine; Systems, Money, Real Estate, Dance, Performance, Lighting, Construction, and Materials. As for me, I had volunteered to be Video Mother, responsible for facilitating and coordinating any closed circuit broadcasting (as it used to be called) that participants might want to intertwine with the general chaos only because my specific responsibilities would be delayed almost until the event. It’s not that I minded sticking my neck out, even though the whole loosely conceived extravaganza might well collapse into puerile exhibitionism, a dance party for bozos, or result in some sort of lawsuit that, despite our thin veneer of insurance, would wipe out the assets of my entire family tree. (I had visions of a drug-crazed teenager diving off a roof beam into a vat of mustard seed; EMS and cops everywhere; lawyers dogging the leaseholders to the end of their days. But I overcame these.) I didn’t mind sticking my neck out, as I say, but no way was I going to commit myself to any more meetings, construction, and legwork than absolutely necessary. I’d just found a temporary studio, a beaut, with spectacular light and views, and best of all a sense of painterly health. It was the studio of Rachel, my friend from prehistory and her husband Carl, painter comrades who were off for the year on a fellowship to morbidly quiet climes. My astrologer kept asking me if I was planning to move, and then I recalled that Rachel and Carl were looking for a second subletter to share their fabulous light-filled space which had always made me jealous. "That sounds like it," said my astrologer calmly. In a matter of days I’d begun something new up there, rarely noticing the panoramic view of the four great East River bridges, or my statuesque studio mate, Leslie. I pretended to be nonchalant, but in fact I’d figured out at last what the hell I should have been doing all along, I was certain of it, and I was planning to do something similar for the rest of my life. Doodle long and hard enough, I’d discovered, and you’ve got a serious problem. Which needs to be solved!

When I wasn’t getting high and copying out passages from Leslie’s paperback of "The Second Sex," a curiously obvious bit of sublimation it occurs to me now, I was getting high and doodling until a real painting problem emerged, and then I was hooked a thousand times harder than I’d ever been when banging my head against an easel on or under the Williamsburg bridge. I’d known all along that it was a matter of making one’s own bridge but, well well well, here it was. So when Lloyd summoned me to the select company that would conjure up Organasm, a part of my heart began tapping out in Morse code the warning that serious painters, ones with serious problems to solve, just painted.

Someday I would have to take advantage of this lifelong instinct to crawl into a cave if I was eventually to be the Greatest Painter in the World, such was the cost, but for right now, when for once I might actually have benefited from sequestering myself, but even so, that hibernatory instinct struck me as transparently chickenshit. After all, I’d missed getting in on Spiderweb and Spork, two ancestral events that had taken place in condemned property on the waterfront, and now the momentum was bigger. If there was a chance that Organasm might be the Woodstock of Williamsburg — or perhaps the Altamont — I certainly didn’t want to miss a front row blanket. I could handle the video. It barely mattered that I knew next to nothing about wiring, plenty of other people knew enough, and I planned on depending upon the kindness of collaborators at the last minute. Beyond that I’d be generally supportive of the project. No one had ever gotten to be a Great Painter, I theorized, by missing the chance to do something interesting when it came along. Meanwhile, I could hole up in the studio the rest of the time and I’d let the Mothers who thrived on that sort of thing turn themselves into workaholic production assistants, all clipboards and beepers. That was, in truth, their art form and welcome to it.

"See you all next week," I said, walking backwards and waving. I knew Lloyd would be standing on the corner talking as long as anyone remained with him.

"So long Ben, hey look at the sunset," said Sharon.

"Check it out! Yo!"

"Yo!"

I turned to see the Twin Towers lit up as if by a terrorist bombing, with the Jersey petrochemical sky aflame behind.

"Yo!" I said.

Drawings by Jim Torok

t h e     q u a r t e r l y     w i l l i a m s b u r g      a r t s      r e v i e w
w b u r g = ( a r t s + c o n t e x t + l i s t i n g s )
( w i l l i a m s b u r g . b r o o k l y n )