*

You just can't sell real art to a Hollywood crowd. I knew this for a fact. I had tried and failed. This was the reason I was leaving the world of make believe, tinsel town, pseudo nouveau rich, and heading for the grunge and grind of New York City. I boarded an airline with a direct flight to the city in August of 1985.

"Hello Sir." said a stewardess as I walked by in my blue pinstriped suit and red paisley tie. I was conscious of being overdressed, but it made packing easier for travel. Plus, I noticed I was called Sir more often. I made my way to seat 2A, a window seat in first class. I always flew first class. Yes, I came from wealth. My father was vice president of International raceways before I retired and became a big game hunter. As for me, I wanted to experience the "real" life. A life with out pretense and not a lot of comfort; but not right away.

"Can I get you anything before we depart?" said a stewardess with green eyes.

"I'll have a bourbon." I said.

The flight was uneventful. I woke from a whiskey induced nap as the plane descended toward Laguardia. The lights of Manhattan were glowing through a late evening mist making the town look like a fairy land. The land of dreams. I thought as I peered out the Transamerican airline window. I was leaving security, and comfort, to come to this... who knows what? Right now, from this height, the fairyland below me looked very attainable.

Things seemed very different a half an hour later as I bumped against an armrest as I sped through the crowded and bustling night streets of Manhattan in the back seat of an abused and dirty yellow taxi. The driver wore a turban and chanted hymns to Allah as we sped through intersections regardless of the color of the lights.

"See, dat. Dat is holy place." The driver pointed at a low building with a banner flying above a doorway. A lonely street lamp made the low industrial building look ominous. Just then he ran over a beer bottle. It popped like a bag of air.

The Arabic taxi driver was still talking over his shoulder to me when he ran a red light and narrowly missed another taxi coming the other way. With hindu music coming out of the car radio to accompany us, the Arab and I did a slow ballet of turns in the streets of New York. Miraculously we didn't hit a single car. "Way to go!" I called out. The cab driver already had his arm out the window. His made an obscene gesture. "Crazy Bastard!" he yelled. The other driver was giving a similar hand sign in return. "Son of bitch." The cab driver muttered, "too blind to see a red light."

The city of New York was beginning to look less like a fairy land. At the moment, it was looking more like a gaudy old whore under a street lamp dressed in sequins. I even imagined the whore "New York City" standing there, skinny legs apart. her teeth plated in tin. A metaphorical allusion to be sure but as apt as any for someone from Hollywood California.

The maniacal Arab managed to deliver me to my hotel without further incident. I noticed he had become more careful and alert. Maybe the near miss had brought him to a higher understanding of the Koran.

I had chosen The Mayflower hotel. The name was right for a pilgrim. Also I wanted to stay at this famous old New York landmark because the Russian ballet dancer Godinov had used the Mayflower hotel to make good his defection from the soviet Union. I thought it would also would be an appropriate starting point for my own defection from the superficial hype and newly wealth of Hollywood set. The cab driver placed my luggage on the curb and I tipped him five dollars. "Thanks for the ride." I said.

"Your welcome, Sieb." the cab driver said as he got back into his yellow cab and sped off into the night.

"Crazy bastard." I muttered as I reached down to pick up my luggage.

"Don't get your underwear in a bundle." croaked a white haired porter who hurried to meet me from out of large glass doors with the hotel insignia of a sailing ship etched into each side. He took my luggage and hoisted it onto his brass railed cart. As I checked in he waited like a large obedient white haired dog. Afterward, I followed him into the elevator.

"Where ya from?" asked the old man.

"Hollywood." I answered.

"Hollywood! You and the Stars huh?" He said, his red rummy eyes twinkling a little. "that's where I go to get my clothes. Ya can't get no good clothes here in New York."

The man chattered on about the positive lack of just about anything in the metropolis as he showed me to my room. I tipped him five dollars also. It's about right I thought. My first night in New York, I ought to tip at least that much. I'll do it until my money runs out. If that happens, Dad will spot me a few thousand until I get my bearings. I assured myself.

The room was lovely. Blue flocked wallpaper with little vines and flowers. Blue curtains. Blue bedspread. I sat on the edge of the bed and let a secure calm wash over me. I took off my shoes and socks and scrunched my toes into the plush shag carpet. This was my ritual to relieve stress and aquatint myself with my new surroundings. I got up and walked over to the east facing windows I opened the heavy drapes and sheers. Across the street I could look into the windows of an apartment building. A fat man in a t-shirt was getting a beer out of an old refrigerator. The beer looked cool, the man looked dirty and sweaty. It was August.

Above the fat man was a couple of lovers. The boy was chasing the girl around the room. She was loosing her clothes. They seemed to be coming off her like rockets. Just then I heard a knock. I hurried to the door expecting a complimentary basket of fruit or something. But when I opened it there stood a gorgeous tall, girl about twenty five years of age with legs that went all the way down to the floor. At least that was the way I saw her at first. My eyes were going up those legs to the violet mini dress that started just a hair below her crotch when she said, "Mr. Johnson?"

"Ah, ah, no, ah..." "Oh, I'm sorry." ... She turned and walked back down the hall. I watched the tiny dress sway from side to side like an advertisement for pigs in pillowcases. I wished with all of my heart that my name was Johnson. I even thought about changing it immediately. It is a vision from the holocaust I thought. I am the victim! She has got my heart. I clutched my breast. She turned quickly and threw me a dazzling smile. "No, no, no, no, no!" I could hear my mother say. I ducked back into my room and felt faint. I closed the door quietly and shuffled over to my bed. I sat on the edge, and repeated over and over to myself. "What did I just do? What did I just do?"

At eight o'clock the next morning I felt better about my self than the night before. I was dressing carefully in front the closet mirror. I saw the blue interior of the room beyond my reflection and it looked a whole lot less lonely than it did the night before. Noticing I needed more light to check for lint on my pinstriped suit, I walked over to the heavy blue drapes and pulled them aside. Sound invaded the room as I realized the curtains were thick to create a barrier against the onslaught of noise coming from the street below. I was on the third floor, traditionally one of the noisiest in the hotel. Going back to the mirror, I put a pin through my tie and pulled the lapels to make it tight in the shoulders. My appointment wasn't until ten o'clock so I was telling himself how hansome and important I looked in the mirror. After breakfast in the hotel dining room, I caught a cab to a gallery in Tribecca; the new hot spot for contempory art.

The Gallery was impressive. Big glass doors, a banner, and huge raised letters fastened right onto the building above the door. There was a desk off to one side with a pretty young lady dressed in stylish clothes. She looked to be about twenty five. I introduced himself.

"Oh yes," she said in a business tone, "you are expected."

I noticed I was sweting. I felt a bead run down my back under my white cotton shirt. The humidity Is probably ninety persent I thought. A fire engine roard by outside, the siren blasting loud enough to make the windows shake. Not exactly the kind of neighborhood I expected for a posh gallery I thought. Grunge was grunge but this was loud as well. I looked at the young lady. She didn't make any sign of agitation at the roaring sound. "How do you stand the noise here?" I asked. She made no answer but glared at me angrily. As the woman stood up I noticed she wore high heels. The extra four inches brought her up to about six foot seven inches in height.

Trying not to look shocked by the shear height of this amazon, I turned and looked out the window behind me in the direction of the retreating fire engine. I took a deep breath. I had been thunder struck. It was love at first sight! I had only read about it in books, but here it was happening to me! My eyes went back to her like two magnates as soon as she turned. Was she in love with me? It was the only thing I could think of at the mometnt? How would I live if she was not!!!? Without ceremony she went behind a wall and emerged with a diminutive man in his mid thirties wearing a silk scarf under his open neck linen shirt. He looked like a puppet next to her.

"This is Jack Stevens our gallery director." the tall young lady (my future paramore) said. I put out my hand and Jack Stevens took it limply and gave me a coy look over his round glasses. Is I gay? flashed across my homophobic homosexual detectometer. (say that three times fast.) I tried not to think about it.

"So, Mr. Hollywood, we don't sell to a decorator clientele here. And what movie star owns who's painting is no longer an issue. As a matter of fact our clientele wants anonymity. Can you handle that?"

"Yes sir that's why I'm here." I stated using a lower voice than usual so the little flamboyant man wouldn't think that I was of the same persuasion.

"Good answer Mister Thompson." the little man said with a lisp. "There is one more issue that our gallery addresses and that is the relationship between artist and our sales staff." The scrawny but well dressed man looked appraisingly at me over his round orange plastic rimed glasses. This time I noticed that they were some kind of fashion statement that probably cost more than a painting by lichentenstien. His blue eyes were mischievously flashing. "I am going to break you in on one of our high maintenance artists and see how you fare. If you are still with after this experience I think that you will have found a home."

I felt my heart drop in my chest. I wanted to be selling art that I believed in. I wanted to be unbiased by personalities. I was wanting a cerebral untouchable cleanliness about my analytical understandings about esthetics. I didn't want to attach faces and personalities to my judgments of an artist's merits. So far, I had dealt mostly with deceased artists who were like distant memories. I didn't want to meet a famous living New York artist. Particularly any of the high maintenance sort. with a flourish of his wrist and a skyward look of his small beady blue eyes the director announced that Angelica Marrow would receive us at her loft in ten minutes. "We have time enough to walk. The stroll will do me a world of good," he said. "I have been cooped up all day.

"Suzanne, you are in charge of the gallery." he said. "Don't change anything while I'm gone. When I get back I will be checking." Suzanne, I thought. The name is like a song, like a poem! Suzanne didn't smile or even look up as we left the gallery. The day was fine as we started our walk toward the famous artist's loft.

"She is so tall that she re-hangs the paintings while I am gone and then I can't reach them." he confided in me while we walked. I thought about her reaching and lifting. It was an erotic fantasy. I saw every portion of her moving in unison. In my mind she was naked. "She does it just to annoy me I am sure." he said playfully. How dare he say anything against the girl I was about to fall in love with and then marry and have seventeen children. I didn't like the little man, I thought to myself.

We walked down an industrial looking street and rang a bell to be admitted into what looked like a shipping company. I noticed I wore taps on his shoes that echoed annoyingly as we walked down an interior hallway to a freight elevator that brought us up to the fifth floor. "Gallery director by day, Broadway dancer by night." he said as he did a little piece of his dance gig.

Angelica Bramley's loft looked more like an apartment than an artist's studio but there were paintings around that lent the space an air of legitimacy. I was introduced to the painfully thin artist who had apparently decided to ignore me. After being totally excluded from any conversation, I wandered off to look at what I imagined to be a work in progress. There were hanging wires and lots of chunks of burned wood littering the floor and hanging at different lengths from the wires. I was taken up with the work and just beginning to under stand it when the conversation between Jack Stevens and Miss Bramley started to go wrong. Jack Stevens was making nervous gestures and Angelica's voice was rising.

"If that's the way you want it. That suits me fine!" Shouted Jack Stevens finally.

He spun on his heel and walked toward the door, tip tapping all the way. "Thompson, you try to talk some sense into this , this, this ..." he was going to say something derogatory then caught himself and ended lamely with "artist." I could hear the elevator engaging and thought about being left alone with this wild female animal. I looked at my hands they were all spotted with tiny red marks and they were tingling. The animal cast a glance over her shoulder at me then demurely walked over to her bed and sat down. She looked at me like a cat, and I must admit I felt like a mouse. Suddenly she threw herself over on the bed face down and started wailing.

I no longer moved of my own volition. Everything I did or was about to do was dictated by the thin woman's demands. I sat down beside her. She turned her tear streaked face toward me. "My father molested me when I was thirteen. Ever since men have just used me for their own pleasure. Just like that Bastard!" she nearly screamed the last word. "You wouldn't use me would you?"

"No!" I blurted out after a few seconds after realizing that I was supposed to say something. I have to admit that I was looking at her flat chest heaving beneath her thin cotton shirt. She was wearing a pair of coolats that were hiked up and as she hugged her knees to her chest, I could see the underside of her tuft. She moved her leg and I quickly looked away.

"I want you to just hold me." Angelica moaned. "Don't touch me intimately." She warned. "I want you to hold me like a father." Oh Jeeze. I thought. But, like a robot, I put his arms around her and hugged her tightly. Without intentionally doing it I looked down her back as she leaned into me. Her thin blouse was pulled up and I could see a big round mandala tattoo going down her back to her tail bone which I could see plainly beneath her flesh. It was like holding a skeleton! She had me down on her bed, and within seconds she was grinding her body against his leg as she sobbed. Then there was silence. I did nothing to encourage her. Quickly she sat upright and her blouse was off. with a singular swift movement.

Afterward I felt like I had been used. Yes, she had encouraged me to do things that I would have liked to do with the tall seductive creature that had knocked on my hotel room door last night. But I had been too afraid. Now it was part of my job! I finished my negotiations and left the high maintenance artist in her loft.

I was dizzy. I walked down the street trying to put my arm through my suit coat sleave, it had gotten caught in the lining. Somehow I couldn't figure it out. I nearly got hit by a bus. I shook my head and decided to leave my coat off and just throw it over my shoulder. Yes, I had jumped in with both feet; and on my first day too! The experience had made me feel like a whore. But it wasn't so bad. I could endure it. I thought to myself as I walked back to the gallery knowing I would find it sooner or later on one of these damn streets. "I am not going to go back to Hollywood." I said placing my hand into my suit pants and scratching. I looked up into a pale late afternoon sky. Was this what I came to New York to do, To be a prostitute? I thought wildly. My eyes fell like birds doing a tumbling mating dance back to the sidewalk infront of me.

There was that woman I saw in the hallway last night. The same tiny mini skirt. The same legs that went all the way down to the sidewalk now. She slid past me like an apprition. But she had smiled. No one smiled in New York City! I turned mid way in my step and my eyes followed those same two pigs in a pillowcase advertisment. How could this be? I questioned. So many women in New York and to find the same one twice! I turned and chased after her like a dog in heat. Had the skinny skeliton that I had just mated with, bitten me and somehow given me the lust bug? All I could do was think about bedding the girl with the legs that went all the way down. Then after her I would persue the amazon with the seven inch heels. I was a prostitute now. I was just like them! We were all just little prostitutes in the one big scarry prostitute of New York City!

I hummed a little song. It had a familiar tune that I put new words to. It went like this:

Old New York had a microcosom. ee iiii eee iii ooh

With a prostitute here, a prostitute there, here a prostitute, there a prostitute, everywhere a prostitute ... Toot, toot! Toot toot!

I began to sound like a taxi.

Toot toot! Here a toot, there a toot, everywhere a toot toot....

***