A couple of months before the weekend in question, I met the
man who lived downstairs. As I helped him move his
refrigerator he told me he was a fiber-artist,
which meant he made complex maps of his soul from weeds and
paper, rope and wire, and he hung them up on the wall. We
became friends,
I guess I could say, in the sad, passing way of neighbors. A few
days later, he knocked on my door to ask a favor, and he
handed me a pair of chore gloves.
He’d rented a truck to bring a loveseat he’d made into the city—it
was a loveseat made entirely from barbed-wire; its whole great
back an arching
Valentine of a heart, armrests clearly not a place to rest anything
at all. Moving it up the stairs of the stoop was a special thing, a
moment you knew the passersby
would pass on again. A barbed-wire chair, they’d say that evening,
and two men wrestling it into a door. A new piece of art was on
his wall: he’d found hundreds
of brightly colored syringes under the Williamsburg Bridge and
cluttered them into a kind of net. The work didn’t have a title.
He played Scriabin
on a record player and smoked a joint. The loveseat filled his tiny
apartment. Where will you sit?, I wanted to ask. He would
suffer, I guessed, for his art.
A week or two later he came through with a couple of tickets to
the opening of the Whitney Biennial, where he worked as a
guard, and I never
could have afforded such a thing. That year all the art was about
oppression, and I walked around in a tie while he guarded
somebody from something, something
from somebody. All I could think about was his wage. He was
forty years old. On a weekend later that summer, some mean
heroin made the rounds
through Manhattan—fourteen people killed in four days. On
Monday my boss told me about his own neighbor, a schoolteacher,
found curled up, dead,
beneath a baby-grand piano. When I got home from hearing that
story, they were rolling my own neighbor out of the building.
His left hand fell from under a tarpaulin.
Five years later I won seven dollars (now I’m trying to weave my
own fibrous confusions into something) on a hand of aces and
eights, and somebody said
Dead Man’s Hand. Now that I remember him doesn’t it mean that
I loved him?
ISSUE: Autumn 1999