The dream of wild black horses ended when something or someone touched my face. By the time I opened my eyes, I felt the after-breeze of a hasty escape and sat up with my hands in my hair and my face vibrating like the fellow in Munch’s painting The Scream. It took several moments to shake off the equine tendrils of the dream. A residual rhythm of galloping horses jiggled the jelly inside my head and forced me to the bathroom.
“Good morning,” chimed Jerome, the tonsured Benedictine monk who lived in the adjacent unit—I’d left the shared bathroom door ajar. Bipolar, and by turns ruthlessly earnest or sweetly demeaning, Jerome always wore a burlap tunic tied with hemp rope, and sandals. The ugliness of his feet, of his gnarled toes and burgeoning bunions, defy adequate description. And though he had renounced worldly possessions, female companionship, and any direct participation in society, he smoked an ounce of medical weed a week and padded around the residence in a slit-eyed fog. More often than not he could be found in the common room stoned out of his tree and gibbering to the television.
“We are weak in the flesh,” he intoned. “I suspect you’ve slipped again. What was it this time, vodka? Aqua Velva?”
I wanted to respond, but heaved. The culprit was Maker’s Mark.
“Shall I palm your neck while you retch?” he asked.
I saw his smirking face from the corner of my eye and wanted to throw something at him, but nothing was at hand.
“Hey asshole,” I said, “did you come into my room when I was sleeping?”
I wiped my mouth with toilet paper and awaited an answer.
“Why would I do that?” he said. “Did you ask Phil?”
Phil was the third tenant on the floor and I’d had little to do with him since I moved in two months ago. I understood he was a recovering addict of some kind. Addicts are boring in the end and can’t be trusted.
“When do you plan to start painting again? Jerome asked.
“I do not plan to start painting again,” I replied. I was done with it. Indeed, I’d been done with it before I was done with it. Now it was final, cast in iron.
“But you’re an artist,” he said. “And you’re not respecting your gift.”
“What do you know about my gift? Have you seen my work?”
“Well, no, man. You won’t show me any of it. Last time I asked about it you just about tore my head off. But I can’t help but think that someone with your intensity is probably an artist of passion. I mean, you really feel the world. I think what you need and what you’ve needed along is a subject worthy of your talent and heart.”
“Nice try, Jerome.”
What he failed to understand is that I identified, more correctly, as a failed artist, and thus there was no gift to respect. The so-called gift had been a disastrous deception for which there was no reparation.
“Close the fucking door!” I cried, “I’m not finished.” He stood there for a moment—gently mocking me as was his wont, that stony, holy fellow—before shutting the door, and letting me get on with my suffering.
This had been going on for weeks, this horrible, convulsive retching. At first I thought it just part of my detox. I knew that twenty years of abusing blow and booze and a catalogue of powerful pharmaceuticals came with a price. But I felt like I was puking myself to death. I couldn’t keep anything down. I was wasting away. And I didn’t want to see my doctor—he’d only tell me what I already knew, that unless I stopped boozing completely I was fucked. But it was one thing at a time for me. First the blow and the oxycontin. And that was no picnic. Booze was the next dragon to be slain. but it was proving more formidable and tenacious than expected. I could go three four days without a drop, then I’d get a raging thirst happening. I’m weak, I’m a weak man. I’ve never been anything but weak. So I drink. I drink to absurd excess. Then I pay for it. Then, while resting my vomit-plastered chin on the cool rim of a toilet, I hate myself just a little more than before. It’s a whole thing. But one has to be philosophical about it. In some respects, the human body is a prison. We’re trapped inside our own bile and guts, and sheathed by an easily punctured balloon of dermal tissue. But when we accelerate the whole rotting process through radical and unfettered abuse, our expectations for health and happiness should be proportionately diminished.
I smiled because I knew I could only beat myself up so much for being a spineless, reckless piece of shit. If I didn’t relent, there remained only one logical way out, and I wasn’t quite ready to be worm food yet. I still had a little fight left in me, or so I thought. Hard to accept—despite evidence to the contrary—that at forty I was finished not only as an artist but as a viable human being. Not that I hadn’t come face to face with the darkness and the thought of self-annihilation on more than one occasion. And being a student—albeit a failed one—if not an apostle of Caravaggio, that maestro of tenebrism, I could identify a poignant irony in this confrontation with darkness. One must be intimate with it not only to depict it truthfully, but also to accurately represent light, no? For without darkness what is light, and vice versa? That said, I couldn’t count the number of sleepless nights when thoughts of offing myself kept me company, were my only company. Or maybe, in the final analysis, I was just a yellow-bellied coward, unable to make the dark and honorable leap. Maybe I feared death more than I hated this life. Or maybe I still harbored hope that I could somehow change this life, that by sheer force or will or fluke I could make it more endurable.
Shouting erupted in the street. Two halfway houses inhabited by drug-addled lunatics and violent offenders flanked my more sedate residence. Skirmishes and loud dust-ups were commonplace; all-out bloody brawls occasional. Police cruisers frequented both places throughout the day and night, often flashing cherries-and-berries or blaring sirens, now and then escorting a half-nude figure screaming or rocking what looked like a fright wig to the cruiser. This always set my teeth on edge and forced me to reach for another cigarette. I had been trying to quit smoking for months, but it was impossible in this environment. The euphoric relief a simple cigarette offered during moment of sharp stress or anguish was inestimable. Cancer? I didn’t think cancer was in the books for me. I was certain my death would outrace any cancer that might try me out. Indeed, cigarettes had probably saved me from several nervous collapses if not a willful header from my third-floor window.
When I returned to my room, thoughts of sleeping had vanished. Not to be flip, but I like to sleep when I can manage it. Never an easy prospect. Sleep escapes me most nights, or at least that’s what I perceive, though in a semi-drowsy state it’s sometimes difficult to ascertain the actual level of one’s own waking consciousness. Often I would lie awake staring at the ceiling, wondering whether or not I was asleep. The insufferable, inching minutes and hours that followed evidenced that I was not. In any event, I lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, flicking the ashes in an empty red coffee mug with a whitened crack in it. I had found the mug on the windowsill of my room when I first moved in and never gave it or its previous handler a second thought. Perhaps I should have.
It saddened me that I’d have to wait to dream of the horses again. I dreamed of them almost every night. I imagine it was a psychic phenomenon, possibly steeped in archetypal symbolism. Perhaps I was being urged by the universe to paint these horses. But I couldn’t paint a thing, not even a stickman, never mind horses salvaged from my dreams.
For the most part the dreams were pleasant, often located in Technicolor dream-meadows where the predominant feeling could be described as a natural, effervescent high. I’d strived for such emotionally resonant effects with my own art, but always fell short. I never could rein in that hint of monstrousness that always crept into it, that horned and hoofed presence squatting on a half-cube behind my brushwork. What explains this? I lost my father at a young age and my mother lost her mind with grief. My friends were few, often disrespectful or bullying. Perhaps that’s why I turned to drawing, for company, to fabricate my own narratives. Back then, before any schooling and theory, I could draw just about anything I chose to draw. I didn’t think about it, I just drew. Now I only thought, without drawing. And when you overthink art, it slips through your fingers. Depicting the marvelous dream horses in a painting seemed impossible given my lack of confidence. This isn’t to say the horse dreams never went wrong—often they did, waking me with their fury and violence, agitating me into sweaty paroxysms. But even that would have been worthy of representation, were I a real artist.
I don’t know if I fell asleep again. Time passed, tinkling like dust. I remained as still as I could, with a rigid stubbornness that caused my muscles to ache. Still, I refused to move. What if I actually was asleep? Where were the horses, if so? I thought I could hear distant vibraphone music, which seemed highly implausible. Who the hell listened to vibraphone music in this hood? Was it emanating from one of the neighboring edifices or from a parked vehicle with a hipster owner perhaps resting his penny loafers on the steering wheel and enjoying a quiet groove by his lonesome, contemplating his place in life, or the precarious state of the world, or perhaps thinking about nothing at all and just being. Then again, perhaps I dreamt all this.
A car alarm jerked me from whatever state I was low-riding. I rose from my bed and checked the change bowl on my chest-of-drawers to make sure buddy boy—Jerome or Phil—had not pilfered any, but it looked intact. Not that I had reason to suspect them of thieving from me. But living on a fixed income forced me to count every nickel. I had never made a nickel with my art. It turned out to be a terrible survival strategy. Too much is made of art. Guys like Caravaggio had patrons. Yes, they had talent. But a patron came in handy. It’s good for the mood, too, not to scrounge and steal to stay alive. Being poor necessarily makes you mean, or it should anyway. Was I comfortable with being mean? I wasn’t uncomfortable with it. The junkies and frothy hebephrenics flanking my residence shunned me for the most part.
I grew restless and climbed out of bed. In the hallway, Phil stood by the bathroom door wearing a soiled terrycloth bathrobe with his head bowed, his long greasy hair hanging, and his left hand cupping his chin. I wondered if was high or recovering from a high. “Yo, Phil,” I said.
“Good morning,” he said, eyes and nose hanging, his complexion pocked and sallow.
“You’re looking down in the dumps,” I said.
His eyebrows rose and his head tilted. After a long silence he said, “I’m contemplating checking out.”
“You mean, out of this place?” I said. I thought he’d been court-ordered to stay there. He smiled and shook his head, then shuffled back to his room.
As mentioned, I’d had little dealings with Phil. Didn’t know much about him. He was thirty something, though he could have been much older or younger. Drugs have a way of screwing with chronology. I gathered from overheard conversations that he hailed from Montreal and used to consort with some of the notorious bikers there. Sinister sleeve tattoos and facial scars confirmed a past tinged with darkness and mayhem. But I also had the feeling that whatever Phil used to be, or whatever he had aspired to be had been played out.
But like Jerome and me, Phil was riding solo. He no longer had agency in his past life and had no choice but to negotiate with this one on his own.
As for me, as early as my late teens I had committed to myself to my art, fantasizing that I could one day make a living at it. When that turned out to be ridiculous, I sold weed to pay the bills until it was legalized, then I peddled cocaine and molly. I also developed a fondness for the white powder that opened the double doors to hell for me. But no one wants to hear another cocaine story. Suffice it to say I compromised my sinuses, my heart muscle and my life doing as much blow as I did. I still drank like a fish and my liver was shot and I’d probably be dead within a decade, but at least I was off the coke. Indeed, I had developed a deep revulsion of it and its jagged, jaw-twitching superficiality.
I killed the rest of the morning in my room looking at a pocket-sized art book. I flipped through it randomly and came upon the work of a twentieth century artist unknown to me, the Florentine painter Massimo Campigli. The painting featured was The Café, a work of oil on canvas. Divided down the middle, the painting depicted two identical scenes, with two figures sitting side by side at a table. The only difference was the colours of the scene on the left were muted while those on the right were brighter, perhaps to indicate the interior and exterior of the café. I didn’t know what to make of it. It had an antique quality I couldn’t put my finger on, something Etruscan or Egyptian, save for the café setting.
Clearly Campigli was shooting for an ancient fresco effect. Nice, but impersonal, even ornamental, and to what end? Not that one had to have a clear objective in mind when creating art. Given it was composed in 1931, during the turbulence of the early twentieth century, I wondered if it was a statement about timelessness and order, or merely exercising a nostalgia or fetish for a passé aesthetic. Was I any different? I had to wonder, with my Caravaggio obsession, which had been with me from the first time I beheld an image of his masterpiece, The Taking of Christ. That painting, with its profound contrasts of light and dark, and its haunted faces, spoke loudly to me. And I’d read later that it was meant to serve as a mirror for self-reflection, which also appealed to me. But maybe that’s where I had gone wrong. My resistance to the chaos of current aesthetics and practices had led me down a picturesque but dead end.
I had stashed half a bottle of Maker’s Mark in my chest of drawers. I was tempted to take a slug, I needed some kind of relief, something to smooth off the edges. I had refused antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. My experience with both had not been favourable—feeling utterly detached from reality and dry-mouthed not my thing. But my stomach was so fucked up, the thought of alcohol almost triggered another puking fit. I smoked about a dozen cigarettes back to back. Like that helped. I just wound up coughing up a lung and violently hating the smell of my smoking hand and my breath. I even considered asking Jerome for a joint, but I didn’t really like pot. It concussed me, made me lose focus or laugh like a donkey. Last thing I needed.
Jerome knocked on my door that afternoon.
“Could I interest you in a walk?” he asked. “Some fresh air might do you good.”
“You think I need it?”
“You need something, brother. How long you been stretched out on that bed? I can see your body print on it.”
I involuntarily glanced at my bed. He wasn’t kidding. The sag was visible, and sad.
“Stillness is death,” he said. “Nothing in the universe is still. Everything is spinning, from atoms to galaxies. So let’s spin.”
“How far you going?”
“Just to the variety store to get smokes and rolling papers.”
I slipped on my tennis shoes and followed him down the stairs to the street. Everyone in the hood was used to seeing him in his monk garb so no one gave him a second look. We passed two brothers with shaved heads who lived on the first floor. They nodded.
“Those two guys,” Jerome said as we walked, “they burned down a warehouse in Toronto. Both are convicted arsonists.”
I burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Jerome asked.
“Did you give me that tidbit for comfort?”
“What do you mean?”
“How do you feel about two arsonists living in your house?”
Jerome smiled. He so rarely smiled his perfectly straight but yellow teeth always gave me pause.
“They’re actually good guys,” he said. “From Newfoundland. They like their screech, boy. But they’re harmless. They were doing a job for someone. And no one died.”
I guess that made it all okay. We walked to the store and Jerome made his purchases. I grabbed a pack of smokes and a Mountain Dew. We walked back in virtual silence but I felt as though we were having a deep conversation. I can’t explain it. Everything he wanted to say, about himself, his faith, our current situation, and everything I wanted to say, about my work, my life, about the fucked up state of the world, it was all there, without a word uttered between us.
It was kind of strange. Jerome wasn’t the kind of cat I usually befriended. I mean, he was such a mess. Not that I wasn’t. But he was different. He could be incredibly annoying and sanctimonious and generally full of shit. Still, something of his soul, however battered, leaked out at me and if anything made me feel more human.
Later, I picked up a pencil and started randomly sketching on a pad. I hadn’t attempted such a thing for years. I had to fight off my aversion to drawing. My hand shook, but I managed to rough out the outlines of a figure. It was that of a man, stooped by some kind of enormous weight. I stopped short of fleshing out the figure or detailing the face. I wasn’t there yet.
That night I dreamed of horses again, little yellow ones like those in Franz Marc’s painting. They gamboled joyfully in a blue field dotted with poppies. This time, it was a good dream. This time, they did not rattle me. But this time, when something touched my face and I opened my eyes, Jerome and his gloom and his mushroomy smell flanked my bed.
“Phil’s gone,” he said, pressing his fingertips to my mattress.
It took a moment for me to fully awaken. “Where did he go?” I asked.
Jerome led me to his room, which seemed lit by Caravaggio. Phil lay on the bed with his hands crossed on his chest and a peaceful look on his lifeless face.
“Do you know what that is?” Jerome asked.
Shaken, I didn’t know what to say.
“That’s the face of your masterpiece,” he said. “Paint it.”
