Chapter Twelve Lesson Three: Gerard

Gerard finally began to open up soon after my brief encounter with the one and only woman in his life. It seemed that after Vivian, whether consciously rousing the questions in my head for the first time or not, it was her physical manifestation and its place in the relationship I had with the artist that made me finally ask the questions I needed to know. They weren’t much, just on that day wondering who the fuck this chick was on his vapid orange couch, but it was enough for Gerard to begin to start the ball rolling himself, without my constant probing and confused looks. His sexuality was now confirmed in my mind, and we could move on from such trivial matters. I wanted to avoid the who course of sexuality in general, mostly because unlike his, mine was still very much up in the air, my clouds of doubt accumulating like paint fumes that began to become a regular smell, clinging to my clothing long after.

Gerard had always been close to me, sharing his thoughts and whatnot, but that had always been in the present, in that moment in time. He always stated if he felt tired after working until three in the morning on his new art piece, or if he felt angry because John, the super, had turned off the hot water again. However, he never told me when and if he had ever felt any kind of those emotions before, and in what situation. I found it hard to picture the artist with a fiery temper, but when his hot water had been vanquished and his hair was drab and listless (in his own opinion, of course; I had no idea about hair), his olive eyes had been flaming and his mouth alive with curses, both French and English. They were never directed at me, and he never did follow through with his threat on the janitor, but I wondered if there had ever been a time in his long life where he had felt those feelings for someone else and maybe even gone through with them. He never delved into his past, his story about how he got to be this forty-seven year old fag artist living in somewhat seclusion from the outside world. And I knew that he had a lot of stories to tell; he had many years to accumulate them.

“The past is the past for a reason,” he would tell me, shrugging off any inquiries I came up with. I’d ask him little bits and pieces of history as we talked, painted, and cleaned. Stuff like where he went to school and why he became an artist. It was never too personal, but he still didn’t like to answer those questions. Each time he’d shake his head with the same response. “We’re in the present now and that’s all that matters.”

The present seemed to be more important than life itself to Gerard. He’d jump from one thing to another when I was with him, teaching me about flat brush strokes and then grabbing me to go outside and look at the sunset, all within the same breath. The present was vital to him because that was what kept him alive. He didn’t want to think about the past because it was done, and he didn’t want to think about the future either because that could change. The present was what he had and he grabbed it by the teeth. It was what caused him to destroy all of his painting supplies, not caring that spending the money on buying new ones would cause him to forgo groceries for another week. He lived on wine, bread, and cheese that he kept at all times in his fridge. Vivian would also stop by, getting something else into his physical system, rather than artistic. There seem to always be half a casserole in Tuperware, cheese melted to the matching lids, or some kind of cookie inside the bare walls of the fridge, but even then he didn’t feast on the home cooking. He gave me a lot of the desserts in grease stained paper bags, stating he was too fat to be eating it in the first place. I would try to tell him otherwise, but he still gave me the treats, laughing off my pleas of his lack of pudge, popping a whole cookie into his mouth in defeat. He was not a starving artist by any means, conquering with his thoughts on that first day, but satiety went so much further than the food he kept in his fridge, or shoveled off on me. He lived off his art and culture leaving him fuller than he had ever felt before.

For the most part, though, Gerard didn’t care whether or not he had money for tomorrow. If he was happy today that was all that mattered, and I admired him for that. It seemed I was someone who lived in the past too much; thinking of the previous things I had done wrong and things that I wanted to fix but couldn’t. Gerard dragged me out of there, made me think on the spot, in the moment. He also jerked my head out of the dark clouds of the future, keeping me from constantly worrying about how I would have to be responsible for things and make decisions. The only decisions I had to make around Gerard were as simple as whether or not I wanted to come and see him that day and what time I wanted to go home at. And those answers were easy to come by.

I began to spend every day at Gerard’s place, soaking up as much knowledge as I could about art and culture, and eventually, the artist himself. I stayed until the sun set behind the trees and we discussed how, if we could bottle the purple shade the sky turned just then, what we would call it. I stayed for hours and the time passed so quickly that I never wanted to leave. I started to skip school because I couldn’t concentrate, going to his place early or playing my guitar at home to pass the time until I could go there. I didn’t want to seem too desperate and go early every day, but there didn’t seem to be such a term as desperation in Gerard’s mind. He welcomed me with open arms whether I was five minutes or three hours early. Time didn’t matter to him, as long as I was there. I didn’t even care if anyone caught me for skipping. I was living in the present, just like Gerard told me to do.

There was one thing about living in the present and forgetting the past that always seemed a tad weird to me about Gerard. He would seemingly forget any occurrences that we had experienced together the day before. He would forget the fact that he had been so close to me as he showed me how to paint that I could feel the beginnings of facial hair on his neck. He seemed to forget that each time he touched me, his hand seemed to stay for longer and longer. He forgot the day in the kitchen, where his hands ran all over my face, determining my age, pulling me so close that I thought we were going to kiss. He forgot those days, those touches and most of all, he forgot the time we had engaged in theoretical sex. The day after the mural extravaganza had been the lesson on modern art. I realized, looking back at that day, Gerard mentioned nothing about the very sexual act we had committed the day before. He essentially took my virginity and then said nothing more about it. He kept touching me, his presence lingering and tempting me, but said nothing after the fact. It didn’t make sense to me; those touches were intimate. Not something to forget. But here he was, moving on as if it were nothing.

He never touched me sexually or made any sort of move, but the way he carried himself around me; his glances, strokes, and voice in my ear, it was not something to be mistaken. Or forgotten. He was always there around me, teaching me about the sexual nature of art and being so fucking sexual himself. It was hard most days; I found myself getting hot and bothered. My ears were even starting to turn red as I crossed my legs so hard in an attempt to stop the blood from flowing there. I didn’t know whether it was Gerard himself that was turning me on, the way his voice spilled from his mouth saying such sexual terminology, or the sex drenched words themselves fueling my imagination and my blood relocation but, fuck, it was working. And it was something that I couldn’t just forget. No matter how much I had already learned from him about not living in the past, this was something that I did not consider the past. I couldn’t. If something was in the past, then why did it keep getting repeated in the present?

When I looked at Gerard’s eyes most days after our lessons, sitting at his kitchen table across from one another while sharing tall glasses of wine, I could see something in them. Gerard’s eyes always captivated me. When I had started getting closer to him, close enough to see the ridges on his face and the distinct shape of his pointy nose, his true eye colour came into focus. It was absolutely astounding – a colour I had never seen before, not even in the buckets of paint that he kept inside his house. His eyes were green most days, but there was this sandy hue, making them sparkle like a jewel, but not appear as overbearing as an emerald. His eyes were a natural dirt-stained, earthy colour, much lighter and more delicate than the olive shade that was painted in his apartment hallways. His eyes were a crisp, clean colour, set aback to the pristine white of the rest of his eyeball. The skin that surrounded the organ as well was white; a pale, sheer hue like the snow that was now almost all melted outside. Gerard’s eyes were like grass outside begging to be poked up through the frozen surface, the sand still clinging to their blades. His eyes had life in them, and as I looked they still bared mention of the previous winters they had suffered through. Gerard remembered the past, no matter how hard he tried to forget. I know he did, looking at those eyes; I just knew it. And it took a while, but after I had really begun to learn this art, he told me the story of his own image.

Gerard had drawn pictures ever since he was a little kid. He owned colouring book after colouring book and always begged his parents for more. He grew up in a time, though, when these toys were not always around, and even if they were, it was debated whether or not kids deserved them. After all, they should be seen and not heard. Kids were supposed to do everything their parents told them to do; not everyone wanted Gerard to spend his days in his room colouring like a mad child and then coming to dinner smelling like the wax of a crayon. They refused to buy him art supplies, only at special occasions. When Christmas came each year, he would be showered in colours and paper begging to be filled. However, Gerard would be out of supplies by the New Year. He lived and breathed his art, even if it was colouring someone else’s picture.

“I was glad when they took away my colouring books,” he informed me over a cup of coffee one day. He had run out of wine and hadn’t bothered to go to the store yet, so we consumed his second addiction: caffeine.

“Why?” I asked, holding the mug with both of my hands, keeping them warm. I remembered my favourite toy from my childhood. It had been this lop-eyed teddy bear. I dragged that thing with me wherever I went. It got dropped in the mud, run over by a car, and even half-flushed down the toilet, but my parents never took it away. I probably would have been the first five-year-old to have a mental breakdown if they had.

“When they took away something I loved, I had to find something else to replace it,” Gerard told me. He was lying back comfortably on his chair, playing with the spoon he used to stir the contents in his mug. “I stopped colouring other people’s pictures and started making my own.”

It was then, Gerard informed me, when his real talent started to beckon. He would go all around his house, stealing pens and pencils where he could find them, taking blank sheets of paper and just drawing. He’d draw anything he saw and anything he felt like. His parents would still yell at him because they would go to open the book they were reading and find his little doodles of the household cat in the corner. But Gerard kept drawing. He was stubborn and persistent and even a little arrogant (but nothing compared to what he was now). Drawing was the only way he knew how to express himself. He had been a late talker and when it came time to start school, he didn’t know how to interact with the other children.

“They thought I was weird,” he chuckled, laughing about his painful childhood memory. “I was the kid who came to school in stained clothing and never said a word. While the other kids were eating paste and shoving crayons up their noses, I was drawing what they looked like. And most of the times, people didn’t like my pictures.”

Gerard’s drawings had been too graphic for people to deal with. When he drew something, he really drew it. It was what the picture really was. He spilled out his emotions through a pen, pencil, crayon, even his own blood one time when he couldn’t find something to draw with. It had been sick and twisted and sinister, but that’s what he had been going for. Often when Gerard didn’t know how to say things, he’d just draw them instead. He said he was a terrible speller, but you could never misspell a painting. If you did, you could always lie and say it was supposed to be that way. It was your work; no one could tell you it was wrong.

It was often, when looking back at his sketchbook that he had made himself out of scrap paper, tied together with an array of staples and paperclips, that Gerard began to realize how he really felt.

“I wanted to get out of there,” he told me, nodding his head. Throughout our whole discussions on his past, he never once looked at me. He stared down into his mug of coffee or wine, as if watching the movie of his life over and over again in its contents. I didn’t mind that he didn’t look at me; in fact, I was almost glad. I could see the emotion and despair across his face as he talked; I didn’t know if I could handle looking at that straight on.

“All of my pictures were of lazy Jersey streets, hobos on the corner and empty pockets,” he continued, his voice clear and concise, not trying to sugarcoat anything. “My drawings were sad and despondent. There was no life around me. There were no hopes or dreams. I didn’t want to draw those things anymore. I had to leave.”

Gerard did leave too, as soon as he could. He had packed his bags when he was eighteen, not saying goodbye to his mother and father. He just left them a picture he had drawn of the Eiffel Tower. He signed his name at the bottom and told them to look for him later, when he could be all he wanted. The Eiffel Tower was his dream and he thought when he left then that he was going to accomplish it. He had talked to his brother, Mikey, the night before, oozing and spilling the secrets he had kept since he was thirteen years old and first saw the majestic tower in a black and white movie. Gerard was going to go to Paris and become a famous artist. There was no doubt in his mind. He had been planning it since that night he saw his dream life on the screen. He had to do it. But Mikey had not been so sure about things.

“He was shaking when I told him,” Gerard mumbled, his brow furrowing as he remembered the sad sight of his small-framed brother quaking under the strong words Gerard threw at him. “He didn’t want me to leave. He needed me to stay. I had been the only person all his life to believe in him. He wanted to be a musician. People thought he was crazy. I wanted to be an artist. People knew I was crazy. We fit together. We were a good match…then, at least.” Gerard sighed, the current memories of his brother coming back to his head. “Mikey needed me, but I left him anyway. I was already starting my artistic journey; I was being selfish.”

I shifted in my seat, feeling somewhat uncomfortable with the way Gerard’s eyes dipped down in his face. He seemed sad, sadder than usual, when he talked about the past. I didn’t want to probe, but I had to know more. We were just beginning his artistic career. I wanted to know how he went from big dreams of Paris and leaving Jersey, to being right back here again. It didn’t seem to fit: Gerard breaking his promise and going back on his decision.

“Do you regret any of it?” I asked quietly, leaning forward slightly. With the mention of my words, Gerard looked me straight in the eye, a dead-serious glare on his face.

“Regret is a useless word and a useless emotion,” he stated, his voice not wavering at all. “Never regret anything you do, Frank. Even if it leaves you cold, alone, and broken – never regret it. Ever.” He paused and looked back into his mug, dipping into the past yet again. “I certainly don’t regret anything I ever did.”

Gerard continued his story, filling in the gaps for me along the way. Before he could have ever gone to Paris, he knew he needed some money first. But since Jersey made him feel drained and only creative around sadness, he had left for New York; the apparent place of opportunity. The art scene was just exploding there, Andy Warhol making a name for himself by painting soup cans and altering pictures. Gerard knew his own stuff was good, people had “ooh”ed and “ahh”ed over it at home, but none of them actually wanted to shell out money for it, mostly because no one had money to spare. But in New York, where this guy had achieved fame and riches for his copyright infringement on Campbell’s, Gerard figured he had more than just a chance at opportunity.

He had been taken aback by the city at first. Its tall buildings and wide landscapes were simply amazing. He remembered standing in front of one building, not even knowing what the fuck went on in it, and just looking up and gawking for hours. It was the first time he had been around something that had more than six stories and wasn’t on TV. He had wandered around the city for the entire day until his feet ached and the small backpack he was carrying started to feel like a dead weight. He underestimated the amount of time it would take him to find an apartment, however, and ended up spending the first few weeks sleeping in the park and drawing sketches there in the day time, selling them for a dollar to the people who passed by.

“Thank God it was summer,” he confessed, smiling a little. “Or I may have froze to death.”

His first few years there weren’t as glamorous as he had hoped. He ended up buying a shit-hole apartment where cockroaches and mice lived under the floorboards and it smelled like mold. At first, he had been scared shitless when he saw the small, gray little creature run across his stairs, but eventually he got used to it. He even started to name them, all after the famous artists he knew. That was where his obsession and constant switching of names that he would eventually force out on his dove came from. It was the first time Gerard felt in control of something, responsible enough to give it a name and make it on his own. He made very little money, only enough to keep him alive. And this went on for years and years until he almost gave up.

“What about Vivian?” I chimed in, eager to get to the next details. “I thought you met her in art school?”

Gerard nodded, gleefully remembering the first time he had met the young woman. He had been in New York, a starving artist in the literal sense for almost five years at that point when he received the bitter and heart-breaking news that his grandmother had died. It had been on his mother’s side, the one he was closest to. She had raised Gerard and his younger brother, Mikey, since their parents had divorced before both children had reached double digits. It was only at his grandmother’s place, where Gerard was shipped after school for baby-sitting, that he was allowed to paint, colour, and draw all he wanted. Even when he had done his own little (unasked for) mural on her bathroom wall when he was seven, his grandmother had not freaked out.

“She encouraged me to draw,” he told me, nodding his head somberly at the recollection. “She was the one who bought me my first colouring book. And she’s the one who still keeps me artistic now.”

With his grandmother’s death came the bittersweet news that she had left the family an inheritance. It was a good chunk of money, too. She had lived very thrifty all of her life, never going out and always cutting corners. She lived in a small house alone after her husband had died, keeping to herself. And when the family had gone through her house to divide up her things, they discovered that she had a lot of antiques – some worth upwards of thousands. It had been a miracle, scraped up from the depths of poverty and death. And it was a miracle that only Gerard could enjoy. In her will, changed only a month before she died, she had specified that everything was supposed to go to her grandchildren. She felt that they were the ones who held the most potential, the most zest for life, and she wanted to see them flourish even in her death. There had even been a special note at the bottom scrawled in her fine handwriting that read: When you stop believing, you stop being.

“It was a quote she told me when I was younger,” Gerard clarified when I failed to see the significance of anything. “She told me that and it really hit a chord in me. It made me paint more and do more. It was the first time I had ever felt accepted, and I repeated those words to myself again and again as I lay awake at night in that shit-hole of an apartment. And even on the days where I didn’t believe in myself, I knew my grandmother did. Somehow, seeing those words at the end of that cursed document made painting after she was gone ten times easier. I had her permission to carry on. To believe again.”

I felt my face fall down into my mug with my half-finished coffee as he said those words. They made me ache and bleed inside, but I couldn’t look away from the man in front of me. I had to keep going, and so did he.

The funeral and her death had been hard on Gerard. He had to uproot himself from New York temporarily to come back to Jersey for the gloomy affair. It was hard returning to the place where everything around him reminded him of the grayness and morbidity of the loss of life, but it had only inspired him more with his art. He filled up a whole sketchbook that week and at the funeral, then slipped it into his grandmother’s coffin as a final thank you gift. He was upset to see her life ending, but it gave him hope. Hope that with the money she had left him and his brother, he could start a new life. He went back to New York the next week, and enrolled in an arts school.

It was at that very art school where the already talented Gerard began to form more coherent thoughts, developing theories that even the art teachers couldn’t comprehend. His writing and language skills improved from the mandatory English literature class he had to take and he became a brief insomniac for those four years from drinking too much coffee and staying up half the night writing and painting his vivid ideas down. It was there where he met Vivian and found someone else he could share all of these thoughts he had spilling out of his brain. Gerard had never really had friends before, other than his brother. All of the kids thought he was weird and strange and avoided him. Gerard had been fine with that; it gave him time to write and think and paint. But when Vivian came along, it opened new doors. It gave him someone else to paint with, someone else to theorize with, and most of all, someone else to dream with.

Vivian wanted to go to Paris, too. She wanted to be a famous artist, but had always been reluctant. Even with all of the cheer and energy Vivian had about her, she was always so skeptical about her dreams. She would envision for hours on end, creating plans and stories and other worlds, but in her mind that’s all they were: fantasies. They weren’t supposed to come true, no matter how much she wanted them to. Gerard tried to convince her that they would and could come true, but it was a hard road to take. She was younger than him in age and in school years. He was nearly ten years older than her and in his senior year, while she was only beginning. She had so much talent for a beginner, though, that Gerard could see it working. Gerard could see anything working, as long as she came with him.

“I told her, when she graduated, we would go to Paris together,” Gerard recalled, now done with his coffee and tracing his fingers up and down the empty mug. “And even when she seemed reluctant to that, I told her that I would go when I graduated, make a nice life for myself so she could come after and we could live together. She could have some security before she left everything behind. And that was what she finally agreed to.”

“So what happened?” I asked, not thinking through anything. I should have let Gerard continue his narration, but I was getting so antsy. I needed to know – but I should have figured it would be a sad chronicle from then on.

“I didn’t go,” Gerard said, the weight of his voice dropping out from under him. He seemed frozen in time after that, his eyes wide and empty, staring at the cracks on the table. I kept my mouth shut this time, waiting for him to continue before I did anything else.

After Gerard’s graduation from art school, his diploma still in his hands, Mikey had phoned him. Mikey was getting married within the next week. It was to his high school sweetheart who he had still been dating well into his twenties. Gerard had never liked her – she always seemed like she kept Mikey too close, afraid to let him wander away too far and never come back. She had bone straight black hair and a nasal twitch to her voice that Gerard said made his ears bleed. He didn’t know how Mikey could stand it when she yelled, which he knew she did often. Gerard was surprised that Mikey had proposed to this woman; sure, they had been dating a long time, but there was nothing special anymore. They were in a nice system of going out, fighting, and then talking again. They were in love, but it was more so for the security factor of having someone in the bed at night to keep the other side warm. Gerard couldn’t figure out why they were getting married; there was no need. Bed warmers didn’t need to have a special ring in his mind.

That is, nothing made sense until he went home. Even though Gerard had to make plans for Paris soon, getting a flight sorted out and figuring out what to take, he still went to his brother’s wedding. Since leaving him that day, with his violent shaking on the bed, Gerard had felt guilty. He wanted to see his brother again, outside of funeral arrangements. He had gone, thinking it would only be a minor affair. But when Mikey’s bride was standing tall and proud at the altar, and as Mikey’s still-shaking hand slipped the ring on her finger, Gerard knew something else was up. Even then, Gerard tried to ignore it, his dreams of Paris over-clouding his mind instead. Mikey pulled him aside during the reception, however, just before he was about to leave.

“He told me she was pregnant,” Gerard commented, twisting his lips in disapproval still years down the road. “He didn’t know what to do. She had told him to marry her and he did. But after that, he was clueless. He had to give up his dreams, which really, he had done a long time ago. He had to be a dad and a husband and a guy who worked at a desk. All he knew was being a bassist. It didn’t make sense to him. And he needed my help. He begged me to come back. I was the only person who had loved him and understood him. God,” Gerard scoffed, disgusted and saddened by the remembrance. “He was almost in tears. I couldn’t say no. I felt too guilty. I had to come back. And I did…” he lifted his gaze up from the mug and looked around at his apartment before sighing again. “Guilt is such a useless emotion.”

His words stung my ears and déjà vu of the same phrase entered my system. I sat in silence for a long time, just thinking of what to say to make it better. I couldn’t come up with anything. I just sat there like a dead weight, waiting for him to continue because there had to be more to his story. This led us up to him being in Jersey again, but I could tell that he was not the same Gerard that he talked about in his story as he was then sitting across from me. It was like he was some other character. Gerard may have given up his dream, but that was not the end of the story. It just couldn’t be. And when he started talking again, my answer was confirmed.

He cancelled his plans to go to Paris and moved home. He stayed with his brother for a while, searching out apartments, but had to leave after Mikey’s new wife began to grate on his nerves. He moved around bit by bit, trying to figure things out, until he finally landed here. All the while, Gerard stopped drawing. He had done it all his life but suddenly didn’t see the need for it anymore. He wasn’t going to Paris, he was in Jersey again; Vivian was gone, and so was his grandmother. There was no point in drawing; he gave it up for almost two years.

“What changed?” I inquired and smiled when I saw his face light up.

“Nothing changed,” he answered, for once happiness gushing from his lips. He looked at me, and when I merely looked back perplexed, he continued. “Nothing changed. That was the problem. Jersey was always going to be cold and gray and death-like. Jersey was never going to be like Paris or New York. And that was the problem – but I was doing nothing to fix it. I woke up one morning and walked around my place here for hours. I sat down and opened my old art textbooks. I could never bring myself to get rid of them. I saw all the artists and I saw all of their work. I realized they lived in darkness too. They didn’t come from Paris where everything was perfect. They lived in poverty – but they painted to change things. I was doing nothing, and nothing happened. I had to do something in order for changes to happen.” He paused, an excited smile beaming on his face. “I took a bucket of paint and I threw it against the wall. I did it over and over again until I thought my arms were going to fall off. I went to an art store and I bought out the entire place. I painted. I drew. I did everything that day, and I felt alive again. I put colour on the inside of here so that I wouldn’t get lost in the nothingness of outside. I stayed in here, cooped away for days on end because this was the only bright side in my life. And when I finally did wander outside after nearly a month of this, I saw the beauty around me again. I saw beauty in the garbage on the street, the hobo in the corner, and even in my brother’s worried and tired face. I realized that just because things were dark, it didn’t mean I couldn’t be happy.” He leaned back in his chair, taking a breath from it all. He looked at me, nodding his head contentedly.

“And I’m happy. I’m really happy.” He smiled, and I couldn’t help but feel my insides burn around me. Every word that came out of Gerard’s mouth touched me in a way his hands never had. They reached inside me and pulled everything out on the table for examination. I knew Jersey was dark. I knew that things here seemed to get absorbed by all of the horrific crimes and fear around us, but I had never known that I could change it as simply as he had. I never knew that by throwing colour on a canvas I could change a life - or lives - like Gerard was doing. He had saved himself, and whether he knew it or not or meant for it to happen, he was saving me right along with him.

“Wow…” was all I could manage to say. He had told me his life story, spilled from him bit by bit, loosened by caffeine and alcohol. It had taken hours upon hours to tell and the sun was already setting out in the dark sky. But I nodded my head, taking it all in. Gerard had been the lesson that day, and apparently, it wasn’t over just yet.

“Do you know what I think we should do?” Gerard commented, his normal presence coming through again. I looked at him, my mouth agape still.

“What?” I asked, feeling a smile forming to match his own. I didn’t think it could get much better than what we were doing then, even if it was only talking.

“Let’s go paint.”

I was wrong. It could get better.

We were off to change the world.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 551