Beer Money

  

Whenever we've had occasion to invite the auctioneer to come through the house, which seems to be at least twice a year these days, we find the value of our inherited antiques and china diminishing at about the same rate as our need for cash increases. “People just aren't buying this stuff any more”, he tells us dolefully, “furniture is tough these days.” He can move the Mid-Century, he says, meaning the Twentieth, but the mahogany, the painstakingly artisanal marquetry? Not so much. He never fails, though, to stop before my mother's paintings and add, “But these.......  These are fantastic. These I can sell all day long.” Then he'll ask again what my mother's name was; he'll frown and crinkle up his brow, try to place her in the pantheon within his mind's eye while I shuffle my feet and mutter about how she was just my Mom and he wouldn't have heard of her. I can't sell those, I tell him. How could I?

   I don't remember my mother having a gallery or showing her work anywhere other than the lobby of the Art Students' League. On those rare occasions when she actually sold something she would celebrate by taking my brother and me around the corner for and ice cream sundae, stopping at Old Smelly's, the butcher on Second Avenue, to bring home an extra helping of beef kidneys for Sue-me, her perpetually ancient Siamese and muse. I never heard her mention “making Art”, nor refer to herself as an Artist. She affected no schtick, no lavender mohawk, not even a beret and, when life and family rendered this indulgence superfluous, she put it aside without complaint. When, some years later, she returned to the studio, it was to be in voluntary service to an entity known as Recordings For The Blind, where she translated medical text-book illustrations into raised-line drawings. She never really craved the sort of validation that comes from a sale, finding satisfaction instead in being needed and turning her anonymous talents toward helping the sightless.

   One Saturday morning when I still thought my own paintings might have some prospect for changing the world, a few of us got together with easels we'd lifted from the College and set up an Art Sale on a windswept stretch of forlorn sidewalk outside the Fain Building on North Main Street. This was not a prime location, most denizens of the area were students engaged in sleeping off their Friday night, and the only activity in the first several hours came in the form of a stray dog who stopped just long enough to lift his leg and pee on one of my pictures. 

     Not long after the canine critic, a clearly inebriated street drunk came staggering along and stopped before a small painting of mine of a nude on a stool – the ubiquitous studio nude from any painting class the world over. He stood there peering at it for the longest time, eying the picture from a variety of angles and unsteady contortions before finally asking how much I wanted for it. Five dollars, I told him, picking the first number that came to mind, confident it would be more than he had and hoping he'd move along. “Hold it for me,” he said, “I'll be back.” Cash! I jeered after him as he reeled away down the street, hunched into the grit and wind.

   The afternoon wore on, the wind picked up. One of my pictures flew off its perch and careened, end over end, down the sidewalk and into the street where it was crushed by a truck. No one came by. At five o'clock we'd begun packing it in; no sales, no beer money, no validation, nothing to show for a day on the street. As I tucked what was left of my oeuvre under my arms and turned towards home, the drunk rounded the far corner and quickened his pace to a frenetic lope. “I was afraid you'd gone,” he croaked.  “It took me all day. I got your money.” I stood speechless as he counted out five dollars in nickels, dimes and pennies, tucked the little picture under his ratty coat and shambled off.