Today, I drove over to Fairfax and did my part as a good Catholic, attending the confirmation of a pair of twins. They were my sisters’s brother’s wife’s children, and no, I’m not their godfather, that honor fell to my sister’s husband’s brother’s wife’s brother, an Irish police detective from Chicago. All of my sister’s husband’s brother’s wife’s family are Irish Chicagoans, and most of them work for the City of Chicago in one capacity or another. So the godfather was there, with several of his relatives – a fireman, a real estate tax assessor, a municipal solid waste dispatcher, an electrical utility inspector, and a Democratic Party ward heeler. That last one doesn’t officially work for the City of Chicago, of course.
There was a reception after the ceremony, held, for primarily economic reasons, in rather close quarters at the home of my dear sister Rose and her husband Henry Palikowski. As regular readers of this Web log well know, due to the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, Rose and Hank and their extensive Catholic family, have been sharing that house with Hank’s brother, his lovely Chicago Irish wife and their extensive Catholic family for quite a while now – and I’m sure, no matter how long it’s been since Hank’s brother’s family moved in, it probably seems like much longer than that by now.
Rose’s side of this highly extended family was represented by Yours Truly and my friend Cerise, who ended up being the sole person at the reception who wasn’t Catholic. In her favor, however, I would note that her mother had, at one time, prior to resigning, marrying and giving birth to Cerise, been a Franciscan nun. This struck me as strange – the part about it only being me and Cerise, not the part about her mother being a nun – since Rose has never been shy about at least inviting my freaky brother Rob Roy, his equally freaky wife Katje and their surprisingly normal, given the circumstances, son Jason to such events. Because if some sort of balanced representation was her goal, Rose had failed miserably. Besides being outnumbered by Irish, the only two authentic Italians at this Papist shindig were me and Rose, and furthermore, the Leprechaun and Toga camps were each awash with a gale of whitecaps in a sea of Henry Palikowski’s friends and relations. I’m not saying half the Poles in Delaware cooked all day Saturday and drove down to Virginia starting at four-thirty a.m., but I’m pretty certain a significant percentage of Wilmington’s glumke, babke, drachena, smietankowe, barscz, bigos, kapusta, cwikla, zawijane and jablka na winie czerwonym ingredient supplies will tally up remarkably short in that fine city’s ethnic grocery stores tomorrow.
So I knew something was up, and it didn’t take long for Rose to prove my intuition correct by hustling me out into the garage for a chat. The first thing I noticed when we entered was that the floor was covered with gessoed canvas, and regular readers of this Web log will know what that meant.
“I see Hank Jr. is still creating action art,” I observed, pointing at the intriguing collection of boot prints, scuffs, oil spills and tire marks, trapped like Cretaceous insects in coniferous amber.
“Yeah,” Rose sighed. “So far, that crap has gotten him a bedroom of his own,” she glanced, meaningfully, at the garage ceiling, which is now also the floor of Hank Jr.’s own, personal bedroom – no mean feat in a house crammed chock full with two large Catholic families, “a scholarship to Brown, and an NEA grant for a showing at the Guggenheim.”
“That’s great,” I cheerfully responded. “I suppose he’s pretty pleased with the situation, then?”
“Well,” Rose confided, “yes, and no. He certainly likes having his own room, and he’s shrewd enough to realize that a degree from Brown, in anything, is worth spending four years in Rhode Island, especially if it’s all expenses paid. And there’s no doubt in my mind that Hank Jr. was very, very honored to receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum, even if the intentions of the curators is to exhibit his work on the floor of a room primarily dedicated to the display of the works of another artist.”
Naturally, I had to ask. “Which other artist?”
“Oh,” she sighed again, “I forget – some Belgian. I’m sure Hank Jr. didn’t care one way or the other until he heard what the other artist’s exhibit would be. Then he got sort of offended.”
“Offended?” I was, frankly, a bit flabbergasted at the naivete of youth. Hank Jr.’s mixed-media garage floors are, after all, conceptual art; and what, in God’s Name, could offend a conceptual artist? “So what is it,” I demanded, “that could be more offensive than a machine which displays the digestion of food, starting with a lunch plate from a trendy TriBeCa eatery and ending with a genuine facsimile of excrement; or walls festooned with sacred religious icons smeared in bovine excrement; or stacks, for that matter, of the artist’s own excrement, carefully canned, preserved, labeled and signed as parts of a limited edition?” I watched her for a reaction. “No? Not offensive enough? How about a gallery of dissected animal carcasses preserved in plexiglass, then? Or human bodies, for that matter…”
“Oh, cut it out, Tom!” Rose shot me an annoyed glance. “The Belgian guy is going to display root vegetables – you know, onions, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, radishes, that kind of stuff – suspended from the ceiling in giant condoms.”
“Right,” I informed her, “I get it. So what?”
“So it’s not like they change the vegetables every week or anything, okay?” Rose crossed her arms in a huff, obviously a bit chagrined. “This Belgian nut case, he leaves them up there until they all rot and turn to liquid. The only time he does anything else is to come in and clean up the stuff that falls on the floor if one of the condoms ruptures. He says,” she continued, clearly finding the underlying argument less than unconvincing, “his work is about the impermanent nature of the world, the unending cycle of change, birth, growth, demise, resurrection and re-birth; oh, Jesus, you know, Tom – all that hippie new-age nonsense people start spouting when they’ve taken too much LSD.”
“Sure,” I nodded with certainty, “I understand. But what you, and, more importantly, Hank Jr. have to understand is that the curators are pairing his work up with that Belgian’s because, as conceptual artworks, Hank Jr.’s garage floors and this other guy’s suspended condoms full of vegetables are about the same thing – which is exactly what you just said – the constantly evolving and temporary nature of our existence.”
“You mean to say,” she pressed me, “that Hank Jr.’s garage floors – and this crazy Belgian’s Brobdingnagian condoms full of rotting vegetables are about ‘the constantly evolving and temporary nature of our existence?’”
“Yes,” I answered flatly.
“Well,” she told me, “Hank Jr. is upset because that Belgian lunatic is going to wait until his stinking, incomprehensible metaphor of the constantly evolving and temporary nature of our existence splatters all over Hank’s.”
“No way,” I argued, “should Hank Jr. be upset about that, and I’ll tell you why – and tell him, if you like.”
“Why?” Rose’s tone of voice indicated she was not about to accept any trivial explanations.
“Because Hank Jr.’s garage floor constantly evolved through a process of organic change for months, with people tracking dirt in and axle grease out, working on their rides, spilling Mountain Dew, Bud Light and Pennzoil all over it, scraping their knuckles and bleeding on it, burning cigarette holes in it, and, if my experience and eyesight serve me correctly, having sex on it occasionally, too.”
Rose shot a quick gander at where I was pointing, snorted in disgust at the excesses of teenage lust, and then looked me straight in the face. “So?”
“So,” I persisted, “in a few more months, Hank Jr. is going to unglue that canvas, ship it up to the Guggenheim, and oversee its installation on a gallery floor. There,” I pointed out with due emphasis, “it will be trod upon by numerous patrons of the post-modern arts, and, even more significantly, it will also interact with another work of art, soaking up, if you will, some of the aesthetic and philosophical elements of the other artist’s world view, as it were, at which point…”
“Hank Jr.’s canvas will be ready,” Rose interjected, “for a trip to a dumpster behind the Guggenheim; where, I might add, it will be completely indistinguishable from that receptacle’s other contents!”
“Don’t be such a philistine,” I chided. “After participating in such a unique and visionary artistic endeavour, that canvas will probably be bought by a serious art collector for a considerable sum.”
“How come?” Rose clearly couldn’t believe that, which is why, among other things, Rose is an elementary school teacher instead of a post-modern conceptual artist.
“Because,” I elaborated, “absolutely nobody, not even the most deranged, stupid and obscenely wealthy art collector, is going to buy a bunch of enormous condoms full of rotting vegetables. But, on the other hand, the exhibition will generate such huge publicity, someone of that ilk is bound to think that owning a work of art which was exhibited along with that mad Belgian’s reeking garbage is an excellent investment – a part of art history that they, alone, can own.”
“Well, all right,” Rose relented, “I guess that makes sense. However, if you ask me, I long for the good old days when people like Pablo Picasso made that kind of statement in vaguely smutty pictures of nude women with three eyeballs. But anyway, Tom,” she told me in a distinctly lowered voice, “I asked you out here in the garage so we could have some privacy.”
“Privacy for what?” I’m always on the alert when I hear my big sister start speaking in a distinctly lowered voice.
“There’s something important,” she confided, “that I need to tell you.”
“Oh, Christ! Don’t tell me,” I sincerely beseeched, “you’re pregnant again!”
“Ah, well, um… yes,” she confessed, “as a matter of fact, I am, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about.”
“What,” I curiously implored, “did you have in mind, then?”
Rose took a deep breath. “Hank Sr. told me they are starting to lay people off at work.”
“That’s hardly unusual these days,” I opined. “About a quarter of a million Americans lost their jobs last month.”
Rose bowed her head sadly, struggling not to cry. “Tom, if Hank loses his job, I don’t what we’re going to do. We’re like everybody else, you know – we’ve got two, maybe three months of savings, tops, then we’re going to have to start selling the cars, and after that…”
Oh, boy, now it was time for a tour of the waterworks. I offered a Dior handkerchief, which she accepted for some demure wipes and a dignified, ladylike toot.
“Come on, now,” I encouraged, “they’re not going to lay Hank off. He’s the one who put Pabulex on the map with the Big Baby Bo-Bo, and, of course, the Big Baby Bo-Bo Point of Purchase Display System, which allows mothers to select from a full range of Soft, Extra Soft, Regular, Hard and Extra Tough textures; and then select across those choices for Petite, Regular, Long and Extra Long lengths; all tastefully presented in a golden-rectangle matrix with the five textures along the top and the four lengths down the side, with the Pabulex Web site URL engraved in fourteen karat gold along the bottom.”
“I know,” Rose sobbed, “but like they say, ‘business is business,’ ‘you’re only as good as your last idea,’ and ‘what have you done for me lately?’ If Hank’s going to keep his job with Pabulex, he’s going to have to come up with another marketing concept like the Big Baby Bo-Bo.” Rose looked up from the sopping wet Dior, her eyes now rimmed with red. “And you and I both know he can’t do that alone, because you were the one who thought up the Big Baby Bo-Bo and invented the Big Baby Bo-Bo Point of Purchase Display System!”
“Yeah,” I reluctantly allowed, “that’s true. And now, you’d like another show pony for Hank to ride around the track at Pabulex so he doesn’t end up out on the street like maybe half the workers in the United States are going to before this horrible mess those thieving slime molds on Wall Street, those drooling morons in the United States Civil Service at the SEC and Treasury Departments, those half-witted whores up on Capitol Hill and those lickspittle supply-side, free-market pimps in the so-called profession of economics got us into.”
“Tom,” she scolded through her tears, “you can’t talk that way in my house. I think apologies are called for here.”
“Oh, all right,” I relented, “I apologize to fungi and/or protists, the mentally disabled, sex workers and sex worker contract brokers for comparing them to the American financial community, the United States Civil Service, Congress and all the economists who knew better and took money from places like the American Enterprise Institute anyway, respectively.”
“That’s better,” Rose said, clearing her throat gracefully. “So – what have you got?”
“Baby clothes that glow in the dark.”
“What?” Rose’s eyes widened. “Why would anyone buy that?”
“You’re an experienced parent, if there ever was one. Tell me what happens,” I asked, “after you’ve finally got the little snapper to sleep, and then you hear something on the baby monitor – so, you decide you need to go back in check on them; what do you do?”
“Well,” she stammered, “I… I guess I go into the nursery and have a look.”
“Exactly,” I agreed. “And what’s the first thing you do when you open the nursery door?”
“I… Oh, my God, Tom, you’re right – I turn the lights on!”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t see anything with just the night light!”
“And then?”
“The baby wakes up…
“And it takes you another half hour to get them back to sleep again, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Rose shook her head sadly. “All those years, all that time I could have been getting some much-needed rest instead…”
“But if the baby was wearing little snuggies that glowed in the dark, you could see them and everything else in the room with just the night light, just fine, couldn’t you?”
“You’re right,” Rose smiled. “I bet I could!”
“Now,” I went on, moving with cool certainty to a bang-up close on the deal, “what if the kid’s diapers glowed blue when they were dry and green when they were wet?”
“Tom!” Rose gave me a big, sisterly hug. “That’s absolutely brilliant! I’m amazed,” she broke our embrace and admired her kid brother proudly. “That somebody like you, who doesn’t even have children, could have such a profound understanding of the mid-to-high-end post-maternity, toddler and pre-school market – it’s uncanny.”
“By now,” I quipped, “it seems to me you would have realized that ‘uncanny’ is my middle name.”
“No, it’s not,” Rose shot back. “Your middle name is ‘Collins.’”