MAXOUT

 

 

 

 

 

I'm an artist. I make a decent living selling my paintings at a small gallery in Greenwich Village.

 

You know something?

 

Most of my work is sold on rainy days to snooty businesspeople with no idea of what the art is actually about. You may think that I'm having you on, but it's the truth. Weeks will sometimes go by without so much as a peep from my agent, Bethany Stone, but on the eves of the biggest rainstorms of the month, the small phone on my desk hurls its shriek into my ears. It almost never fails.

 

It's almost supernatural.

 

Bethany’s voice. Though I haven’t known her for her entire life, I’d guess that her voice has always had a hard edge to it. You know, the sort of thing that almost always comes from living a hard life in a big city with too many people with similar life experiences in it.

 

She'll call me on overcast mornings with a few more peaks in her voice than usual. "I think we're going to sell a little blood today, John," she says in that hard-edged voice of hers. "I think we're going to go on eating for a while."

 

Always the same thing when the air is thick with moisture and edgy with the taste of fresh ozone. She's been saying the same thing for ten years. The same thing since we first met on Fifth Street, me with my hand on my first profitable painting, Google In Vogue, her with a small briefcase (a sky-blue shade that matched her power suit) bumping against her lower hip. She was crossing Fifth Street at a brisk pace, her eyes set on nothing other than the wall of the building I stood against.

 

I wore faded wash jeans and a T-shirt with odd wares to hock, starving artist motif. With each step she took, the sigil of the god of Industry swung at her side. Horns honked at her as she crossed Fifth Street. It looked as if she had chosen a bad time to cross. The lights were green and the flow of big city patience was against her.

 

Horns blared and curses were bellowed; fists were shaken, money to be made, destinations to be reached, but none of these things bothered her. The long middle finger she popped and waved to her right spoke every word her mouth didn't have time to.

 

As she stepped over the curb on my side of the street, I was packing in my work for the day, my thoughts on nothing but how disgusting cheap noodles and red sauce would taste that night, the eighth night in a row.

 

"Young man," Bethany said that evening, as the last of the horn blasts aimed at her died away. "A moment."

 

I looked up, startled out of my reverie by the rather clipped and commanding voice of this stern-looking stranger. At first glance, Bethany was to me what she undoubtedly was to most people who saw her for the first time: a haughty b***h who walked upon nothing but the finest dirt.

 

My first profitable painting put three hundred bucks in my pocket, and food of the non-noodle variety on my table. Beans and franks, I think it was. Nothing like humble pie in times of plenty, my aunt Frankie used to say. Atop the check she paid me with, (which was produced and written right there in the shadow of the shabby building I'd been trying to sell my work against for six months) Bethany placed her business card.

I remember that the sky was sinister with big rain clouds that day.

 

"There won't be a single piece of yours that won't bring big money for you on a rainy day," she’d said, and then she turned and walked away from me, on that evening so long ago, now.

 

She turned out to be absolutely right, of course. Bethany was almost never wrong when it came to the ins and outs of her craft.

 

"Blood in your paints?" she asked me, three years later this was, over sausage croissants and black coffee, no sugar. We sat in my studio at the big oak desk before my favorite easel, (her in front of it, me behind) which I'd had set into the floor of the place. 

 

 "You're shitting me, you are."

 

"No," I said, staring at her through the tangy air of the studio, the sounds of moving traffic climbing up through the environment and into the studio windows. "I'm telling you the truth. There's a drop of my blood in everything I paint. Good luck, Beth. It's for good luck."

 

"Don't call me Beth," she'd said to me over the noise of city life that flowed in through the windows, though a thin smirk crawled across her face after she had spoken. Bethany could be stern, no doubt about that, but she wasn't a b***h.

 

Three floors below, someone screamed a creative string of swearwords at someone else. Bethany grinned. A rigid thing, that grin. Bethany wasn't the sort of woman who felt comfortable smiling in anything other than a business setting, where there was money to be exchanged, contacts to be made, walls to be bulldozed.

 

 Stiff opinions to be razed to the ground like condemned hulks too primitive to remain human dwellings.

 

"Your grandmother was a practitioner of Wicca, you don't have to tell me," she said to me, waving her free hand in my direction. "All you artsy-fartsies have bizarre family histories to draw on. Muses, you people call them."

 

I looked at her, amused. My head tilted to the right, the face of a puzzled dog. This happens when I am amused. Or so I have been told. Downstairs, tires keened like sick infants forced through wood chippers.

 

"Don't look at me that way," she said, setting her coffee cup down and standing up. "I'm not judging you. I'm not paid to judge you. I'm just the monkey that turns the crank to draw in the crowds. Blind eye, my friend."

 

 A moment later, I was alone in my studio. Just me, my vision, and a needle to prick my middle finger with.

And of course, all of Manhattan to lay the lash of progression to my backside.

 

Two days ago, Bethany was badly injured. A freak accident. A crane-load of cement fell on her from two stories up.

 

It’s a miracle she wasn’t killed on impact, the papers all said.

 

The walk into the hospital room, the antiseptic smell of it stinging my nose, wasn't something I wanted to do, but then, well…it was Bethany. Over the course of a decade, the serious woman with the keen eye for good business had grown into a friend.

 

"You got your finger-pricking needle, Van Gogh?" she asked with a swollen mouth when I stood to take my leave half an hour after I walked into her room.

 

"Why?" I asked, confused and a little scared for her state of mind.

 

"Gimme a prick," she said, wincing as a genuine smile forced its way onto her face.

 

A friend's blood in my thoughts, and now in my art, (at her own drugged and bemused suggestion) my own blood in my art. There's something Wicca about that. Something powerful. 

 

A maxout of luck.

 

 

Reviews

[Logan Carryall]

I got chills. You turned it around mighty fast. The wicca tie at the end, and the pin prick. You held all the weight in a fast moving flow! I got so much more character understanding in the new edition. Great revision!!! A very cool way of getting your point across too.

-Logan

[Logan Carryall]

I started to love your characters come mid-piece. And as always Hawksmoor, you are very quick to get the reader "there". In the beginning I felt the characters were being described weakly, or at least I thought they would fall flat. I didn't believe it for a moment: "You know, the sort of thing that almost always comes from living a hard life in a big city with too many people with similar life experiences in it." I thought this said nothing for the character. This was were I found my lack of faith.

But your always present talent for interesting character elaborations, and flow, saved the day. The middle was great. I don't know how you got both characters expressed so fully in such a short time, but you did. I like the characters alot, and I wonder where they are going.

I love what you are saying in the ending, yet I feel it needed more reinforcement so that your last two lines held the power they deserved. I got it, but I felt as though a less observant reader would notice the flow break, and the quick turn of random events, and say "ewww cop out". Although I know you aren't. I think you can slow the pace in your time, and give those lines up with greater strength. My idea. So don't care, or do. lol. I'm a jackass mostly.

But I'm telling yah Brody, your characters are real. You have a way with dialogs and subtle interest. You got the skills for writing people, and having them speak honestly. (and in all my criticism It is only because secretly I wanted a lot more!) Blood in the painting, and the piece. Great job!