Adriane: Abscess and Abuse

Chapter Four:

Abscess and Abuse

Adriane sat on the stool in her studio again after laying in bed for an hour. Then she got up and took to the easel with renewed energy. The blank canvas held no fear as she swathed it in blues, blacks and greens… framed by zig-zags of yellows and red energy… another portrait but not exactly angry… more like an agitated distance with a hint of pathos. The conflict was gone and she was no longer suffering. Yes, a junkie doesn’t suffer addiction. Up to a certain point addiction is the solution to suffering for the likes of Adraine. When heroin leaves the body it exits the same path that it entered… only it leaves with a vengeance. Every cell, muscle and nerve-ending cries out as the hunger makes itself known.

            The sad fact for her was that she needed to paint and heroin helped her do that. Why does she need to paint? It certainly isn’t for the fame or fortune of selling any of her paintings. She does have a dealer in Paris but that fucker doesn’t think she is doing anything progressive or avant-garde by her paintings… Adriane thinks again, “Or by painting at all.” Painting on a canvas with oils is more of a fetish to her than a devotion to art. Is it a fetish for retrieving something of the past, perhaps? They said that painting was obsolete with the first Daguerreotype until Braque and Picasso blasted our perceptions. Then the Dadaists and surrealists took art out of the studio and onto the public stage making even the idea of ART seem somewhat silly and arcane. When Jackson Pollack came along and splattered his canvasses with action paintings, it made the act of painting a self-obsessed hobby for the moronically elite that would be better off if we all went to go get a job in a factory than to toil away trying to find relevant meaning with oil on canvas. Andy Warhol didn’t mistakenly call his loft The Factory and he made it clear that the highest purpose of art in the later half of the twentieth century was to make money. He made himself even clearer if ever it was posited, “My five-year-old can do as well as that!” He answered, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Implying, “Can your five-year-old make the kind of money I make with it?”

“And, art schools! Psshhhaw!” Art schools were to her just places where semi-affluent parents put their kids before they finally make up their minds to go out into the world selling real estate. These places create in each student the delusion that there is a place to put their scribblings. The big secret is that the “Art World” only opens the window of opportunity to a few selected artists each decade and then slams it shut. These artists are touted as the winners of the lottery and are encouraged to believe that what they do matters somehow. Artists who somehow stumble or get diverted… loose interest or see through the guise… are pushed aside for the next crop out of New York or Los Angeles.

“Why then should I imagine that painting is any more important than keeping a personal diary? Either my desires, my intuitions, my experiences are universal and have an appeal to other people; or, it is all a vain pursuit and I am just spending my time between birth and death, pretending to be more important than all that,” she concluded.

She wrote in her journal, “Between birth and death… between one fix or another… I no longer wonder what it is that I am doing here. It is a dreamscape I occupy for a spell… a spell cast by an illusionist… the master illusionist… you call it God? Mickey calls it the Great Whazoo. How many theologians can we count dancing on the head of a pin? But in the dreamscape something else is going on. Angels or Demons, I can’t tell which”

The doorbell chimed and Adriane descended the stairs displaying the contours of her body, pulling her robe over the purity of her nakedness…. aka Duchamp… and closed it with a strap. She opened the door. Two police officers were standing close, noses nearly touching the door trying to peek in through the peep hole. They stepped back, startled, “Eh hem, Officer Dan Richards, are you Mrs. Adriane Baker… Nicholas’s wife?”

She supposed she might have left the gate open… it annoyed her when people got all the way onto the property and to the door while she was working.

“Yes,… no, er… I am… that is at least until the divorce is final. What did he do now?” She truly never knew about Nick when the police showed up at her door.

“He’s okay. I simply need to know if you will let him in your house.” Officer Richards spoke somewhat sneeringly.

“I don’t like the looks of this… what is going on?”

The officer was more congenial, “… he told me to take him here.”

“Why not?” She had no idea. Nick’s dad had some sort of pull with the SBPD and DA’s office. She was sure what; but, whenever Nick got stopped for driving all smacked-out or drunk, he never went to jail or got a ticket for it. She thought of his sense of entitlement… “What do you want me to do?”

“Okay, I just needed to check with you.” He went back down and fetched Nick out of the squad car. He could walk on his own but he was in one of those Zombie trances. She had Nick escorted into the music room to the couch. He sat without saying a word.

“Here’s the keys to his car. I had to park it down the street.” She swears he leered, “You are okay to drive, right?”

She didn’t think she looked fucked-up. The question annoyed her and the prospect of putting up with Nick in her house was more than she could take. She snapped back asking, “Do I look okay to you? You are the police, aren’t you? You should know…”

“I’m sorry; I’ll be on my way.”  He went back to their squad car and waited until she got in Nick’s car before he left. She was fearless and not afraid of being nailed for a DUI. She was high, alright, but she wasn’t drinking. Besides, she doubted whether that cop had been able to see her irises through her transition lenses. Even though Richards did made her nervous the way he was eying her up. Of course, she put on a tease walking down to the car in her lightly transparent kimono style robe. It didn’t make any difference to her any longer as she got into the car and parked it up in back in car-port. While parking it, she rammed the garage wall, breaking a stanchion… she’d get someone to fix it later… and then she made her way down to the house with Sushi and Tofu in tow.

“So, what the hell, Nick: are you planning on staying here?”

“Uhhh, mmphmutter mumph.”

“I can’t understand you!” She shouted directly into his ear.

“Uh, I’m not deaf, do you have any coffee?” he slurred.

“Sure…”

“How about coke?” he spoke more clearly.

“A Coke?” She was pissed and wanted to needle him.

“Coke….,” his head slumped, chin to his chest, “c’mon, girl, Coke.”

“You can say that clearly enough now… damn it, Nick!” She went into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee, opened the fridge, grabbed a can of Coke, put an iced-glass on a tray with the Coke and coffee, and served him like a waitress.

“Thanks… Not that coke! Can I use your phone?” he bent down to the tray, brushing the glass aside and sipped from the cup without lifting it.

“You’re a cow at the trough… eh?”

He looked up at her with big cow eyes… “You got Billy’s number?”

“Billy? You know Billy too?”

“I introduced you,” he paused a minute and asked, “didn’t I?”

“No, Rod introduced me to Billy.”

“Who do you think introduced Rod to Billy?”

“Small world?” She had no idea that Rod had any contact with Nick before they’d...

“Yeh, I told Rod that you would soon be available and I’m the one that told him he could go ahead. I hoped he’d fuck the shit out of you.”

He was goading her now and she was playing right into his hands.

Adriane felt dirty with Nick in her house. She shuddered to think that she once loved the man but he became a shadow of his former self. “You have to go, Nick. I can’t live in the umbra of doom you bring in my door.”

He didn’t answer. The fucking mute provoked more anger and she wanted so badly to lash-out but feelings of indifference prevailed. She went upstairs and changed into street clothes, putting his car keys in her pocket. She came back down to the foyer; he was standing in front of the door, blocking the exit. He towered over her and weighed at least a hundred pound more than she, but he wasn’t going to intimidate her: not today anyway. “Get out of my way, Nick.”

“No.”

Taking off her shoe, it was only a canvas deck-shoe; she whacked him across the face… once… he didn’t move… twice…. he flinched… the third time, he came at her. She backed off, “What are you going to do?”

She suddenly realized how stupid it was to attack him with a little shoe. He was so doped up she could have hit him with a poker and he wouldn’t have felt it. He wrapped his arms around her in the straight-jacket of his embrace.

“Stay here Adriane, call Billy. I need to talk with him.”

“Talk?”

“Yes, I’m broke, I need to see if he’ll give me credit… or maybe you, my beloved, can do that for me?” he let her go, “You know, for old time’s sake?”

“No… I won’t do it. You are already into me for more than twenty grand, you bastard.”

She came to… not knowing what hit her or how long she lay there. She looked in the hallway mirror. Half her face was black and blue. The keys to his car were gone… shit, what now? She felt like she couldn’t go anywhere with her face like this. Should she call the cops? What good would that do? He has too much pull with them. Call Billy? Make sure he doesn’t score? Oh, God, if only Gotson were here…

Confusion… a doped and confused state of mind… that is what heroin does. She counted the benefits… I can still paint when stoned. Methadone would be a good idea…did that once and was okay with it but hated it when they start cutting back on the dose. They do that to gradually wean you off it but that doesn’t work for most addicts unless they truly want to quit enough to suffer that… and she never really did. All that process did for her was… well, she calls Billy for something better and sometimes ends up waking with tubes and crap in the ICU.

As she stood there she felt her hip where she usually hit up. A bruise has been there for a few days… maybe a week and it is getting worse. Everyone knew about all the bugs… a flesh-eating virus had been going around town. Damned tar, she thought: That bruise on my hip is full of puss now. My face black and blue… my jaw hurts… It hurts to open my mouth… I need to get to a doctor for some antibiotics and check on this jaw. Forget Nick. Forget the house. She called Mickey to see if he could come over. Maybe he can give her a ride to the E.R.?

It was at least an hour before Mickey showed up in his taxi, “What the hell happened to you?” he said as she let him in.