The Rise and Fall of
Sylvester Sylvester
(in the "Baldie Stories 1"
collection - on sale at Amazon.com
The launch of the hair-sculpture
series had catapulted Sylvester Sylvester's mediocre career from a chip-and-dustbin
sculptor into a porcelain-precious art-star.
"No darling, Cinque Terre! Sweetheart! We open in London, fly to
Prato to visit Andrea, and then after party in Vernazza, or Monterosso, or
something."
When he tried to move away from the hair-sculpture series into the
belly-button lint series the empire nearly collapsed, but thirteen shrinks and
forty milligrams a day later, things stood up again.
"No, I don't really mind except for the ankle bracelet. Honestly, I
still don't think it's polite, but when they explained how valuable I am, not
only in dollars and cents but as a cultural asset, I figured it was a small
price to pay..."
The first reviews were less than inspiring. In fact, they were simply
rude. "Hairball Dreamer," said Smitty Roberts.
But he pressed on. The bad press grew in pace with the scale of the
hair-sculptures. By the time he had replicated Michelangelo’s David in pubic
hair, his career had been secured.
"Someone will always complain that you've changed! It's
jealousy."
He forfeited his friends with the ease and grace of a dedicated
visionary. His divorce was a masterpiece of decorum and civility. The attempts
to spin the accent didn't fare well, but his truculent British made for some
good laughs. By the time he was famous, so were his new friends and family.
"Are you kidding? Birdy-Birdy isn't a pet name for my new wife! You
haven't heard of her? Famously failed snuff-film star, third world self-help
guru, Post-Fluxus Now and Then Again-er? I have no idea what it's all about,
but she looks fabulous head to toe in motor-oil..."
There were two art-star children: Yem-Yum & Hoppity. There were
issues: Yem-Yum was born with two tongues. Hoppity wouldn't learn how to speak
until he was twenty-six, and then all the words that came out of him when he
did were horrific. But SS & BB, as they were known in short circles, didn't
care much for the kids anyhow. No tears lost there; the tots treated the art-stars
like lepers. Couldn't stand them.
"The children - just never got the feel for them, you know, in a
plastic sense, art-wise – that is, three dimensionally..."
Great fame came with even greater absurdity in art and in family life.
Sylvester Sylvester teased his hair up into a mighty volcano above his
long forehead. Every ridiculous inspiration made that mountain shudder and
worry. Birdy Birdy staked a claim, officially, on a plot of space within that
mass of hair, claiming it "A Studio within a Studio." She staged
performances atop Sylvester Sylvester's head. She fashioned cages out of
garbage and hair, introduced insects and vermin, made short digital clips - the
torture of both man and beast - and sold them to educators as learning tools.
You wouldn't believe how fast they sold.
"They call it "Picasso's Castle", but it's mine now, I
bought it, right? So we call it Casa Neurotica. Ha! Get it? A play on words!
Neural erotica! Ha!"
It was about that time when the hues of joy and tints of fortune shifted
spectrum for the art-star clan.
"Chiggers, dear. Chiggers or larvae; something or another with
wings or claws or antlers… You know something? I once spent two months sitting
on a cold branch waiting to take a picture of a newborn deer, just to see what
the tiny antlers looked like! Can you believe it? Anyhow, it's an infection -
critters burrowed under my scalp. Long-short, I'm bald as a bat!"
Meetings became awkward among those wealthy collectors and sparkling
curators who divined weakness through osmotic translations of failed couture.
One bad hair day, and the vultures whispered. And there was “Good-Bad” and
there was “Bad-Bad," just as there was “Good-Good” and “Bad-Good.” Not so
tricky as it sounds. Sylvester Sylvester's festering scalp evolved. Soon,
dribbling pustules sputtered over a scaling toss of infected flakes, pink meat,
and grey ooze...It was “Bad-Bad."
The top of that head was a crime scene. SS was slow on the pick-up.
"What do you mean it didn't bid well? What does that even mean? We
own that auction house, don't we?"
And before Yem-Yum had his second second-tongue removal (the little
bugger grew right back after the first removal), Picasso's castle was sold to
another equally visionary art-star and was renamed Pookie Palace. To add insult
to injury, the poor structure was immediately adorned with a twenty-five foot
tall vitrine filled with raw chopped-meat, which baked in the late July sun,
just outside the welcome-rotunda, until the Board of Health came and carted it
away.
"Well, of course BB is upset! But it's common knowledge! You never
approach a body slathered in motor-oil with an open flame!"
Down was less graceful than up. Jack and Jill. Humpty Dumpty. The rest of
them…
Eventually, Yem-Yum would find success in gimp-porn. This worked well to
support theories of Darwinian linearity. He would sire sixteen children, half
of them double-tongued, and they, in turn, would thrive and multiply until
things got really sordid. But before all that happened, this happened:
"We all overextend! It’s capitalism riding invention! Daring pays
for daring! Art is commerce! How can I be broke?"
They were kind enough to take off the ankle bracelet. They left him the
credit cards, the balances, and the receipts for the collateral on loans that
paid for the Up. The fine art in hock never had the SS initials. They wouldn't
rate it, even though the loans were signed with the very same initials. Funny
how Down works sometimes.
"No, BB and I love each other mucho gracias! It is our art that
defines our attraction, not our physical selves! My disfigurement and hers…this
is no coincidence!"
In fact, it had mattered greatly. Birdy Birdy was appalled by the
disintegration and dilapidation of Sylvester Sylvester.
What began as an infection of the scalp spread downward - hot lava
seeped beneath Sylvester Sylvester's skin. Angry molten eruptions burned
through his flesh. The pain split him in half, and then quartered him. Birdy
Birdy sympathized. Her burns were no less dramatic, and they covered her in no
slow dripping manner. Flames had consumed that horrible day, and the few
moments before she had been extinguished were moments that would pain her
forever. She feared she would never perform again.
But it was art and love that mattered! In the end! Nothing else! Balls
to anything else!
Except that SS had a very hard time looking at BB.
"I'm a surface aesthete! I love the surfaces! Give me a nice
surface, and I'll show you something nice."
He'd meant to suggest that he was not a shallow being, not by a long
shot. He was a spirit who had been folded into being from gossamer strands of
universal fineness. He'd meant to suggest that his perception was rarified and profound;
his existence, a singularity of cause - a tattoo to that effect he considered; something
in Latin across one brow, or better still, the tips of his fingers...
What he meant to say was that Birdy Birdy no longer aroused him. It had
been bad enough with the kids plowing through her. Now this!
Deeper.
"The Highbank
Annex is not on the water, it's in the water! This is about the meeting! The
Highbanks were repulsed! Listen, I'm not giving in! What do you mean you won't
stand beside me on this?"
Sylvester Sylvester
lost sleep. Alone, in that big bed, he cried and dreamed other people’s dreams
- dark things - resistance, lethargy, and ordinary fear. Birdy Birdy gave up
sleep entirely. It simply hurt too much.
"I made it on
hair and lost it on hair! I am a phoenix! The bald phoenix! Rebirth! There will
be a sign!"
Hoppity hadn't as
much as burbled a sound in the up or down years. It was noticed. His only
reaction, to any attempt at communication (or any external stimulus at all),
was a singular dissatisfied and disparaging eye-roll. Except when someone got
hurt. When someone got hurt, Hoppity laughed with his head raised high, chin to
heaven. Hoppity laughed a lot at Sylvester Sylvester and Birdy Birdy. SS could
only admit to himself that it was in this interminable silence and deranged
laughter that he found his sign.
Abandonment.
The universe had
forsaken him and was mocking his isolation.
"I'm down to six
assistants, four packers, and two runners. This isn't a studio - it's an
abandoned warehouse! And my studio manager had a meeting with accounting and
they're cutting back on catering!"
Oh, the empire had
grown to its limit and was contracting rapidly. Sylvester Sylvester hadn't
touched one of his own works in eleven years. He hadn't sketched one out in
six. He hadn't worked concept or strategy in two. He picked scabs, cried, and
tried to believe in the vision of the bald Phoenix rising. But instead, all he
saw was Yem-Yum's second tongue growing in for the fifth time, Hoppity spewing
his awful nothing, and Birdy Birdy. There was that.
Her need for
attention and determination to be the strangest of all creative minds inspired
her to create GimpPark. She spent six hours a day in a hole in the ground,
"performing." Others she hired performed beside her. It was a minor
success. SS never saw BB much after that. She found her own crowd and he found
something else. Eventually Birdy Birdy wrangled a divorce from Sylvester
Sylvester. She waited until the kids had grown and did it to legitimize the
relationship with a confused, cross-dressing hermaphrodite who assumed the
well-suited role as the bearded-lady in the geek show.
It was better for
her.
"Milano is off
this year. And Venezia hasn't happened in six years, so there goes another
country!"
And as the countries
and dealers and clubs (you wouldn't believe the clubs, how they knew - one
opening flop and you aren't making it to the Adonis Wing at Sha-Sha) withdrew
their favors, Sylvester Sylvester found himself back in the studio, late at
night, with his one and only remaining assistant, Flemgaard. Together, they
drew up concepts for new works of art and puttered around with tools he'd never
touched before: paint brushes, carving tools, armatures, cameras, blow torches,
and other items that lay around in various workshops and different floors of
the ever-shrinking studio real-estate that was his home. It was boredom and the
need for diversion from the crumbling losses that put a mallet, a strobe light,
and a die grinder in his hand. His condition never improved. Bacterial viruses
bred mercilessly upon his body; diseases found inspiration in his hospitable
bowels.
"Yem-Yum left
grad school to travel to Amsterdam. Says he met a nice group of people there
the last time he visited with BB's troupe. And Hoppity is still here. Funny, with
a name like Hoppity, you'd have expected more."
Long after the last
agent broke contract and shortly after the last gallery returned unsold work,
Sylvester Sylvester began making profound and beautiful things. He'd never sell
them - no one looked or listened when they pretended to look and listen - but
SS didn't notice and didn't mind. He and Flemgaard broke artistic boundaries
daily. They sat quietly in the small, single-floor studio, sketching, thinking,
and drawing in the power of that silence, while Hoppity washed brushes, edited
photos, changed tanks, and rolled his eyes.
Hoppity was twenty-five
years old when Flemgaard married his sweetheart, Betsy, and moved to a small
town with no name beside the Snake River in Wyoming. Six months later, a dealer
stopped by after hearing rumors about a tragic character, a rising phoenix, a
hermit of sorts, living downtown with his idiot son.
"He wanted to
look around, why would I mind? It had been years. I had no need, and no care.
The place was paid for, they'd taken theirs, and there was enough left for a
quiet life. I told him to make himself at home. He didn't flinch when he saw
me. Point for him."
The dealer was shocked
by what he saw. Astounded. The body of work was breathtakingly simple and
profound. The idiot boy trolled among the divine objects, tinkered with them,
grimaced and shook among them, disappeared and reappeared silent but proud.
"Twenty-six
years. Not a word. Then, the dealer stands there in the morning sunlight and
makes a suggestion. He spoke a few kind words. I hadn't heard kind words in a
long time. Not from the art world. And then..."
And then, Hoppity
spoke.
It was loud and
profane. It was a storm of anger and violence. It was what Adam should have
said to the serpent. It was pure and hateful. It was magnificent and lasted for
as long as the dealer stood there with his kind words and decent suggestion.
When he was gone, Hoppity went quiet again. And Sylvester Sylvester looked at
his son and nodded.
"No, not too
many people come around much at all, with me looking the way I do, and Hoppity
guarding against kindness and good intentions the way he does. No. We see Flem
now and then. YY doesn't bother; he's busy spawning. BB died last year.
Chainsaw accident. I miss her. All in all, we get on. We make things. It's nice
to make nice things."
And that's it. That
is the story of the rise and fall of Sylvester Sylvester.
The End
