Burnaway

[cont.]
Sitting up after the choking and coughing subsided, he looked at the drips, and that sudden shock of seeing possibilities made him smile for the first time in forever. Way to go, he told himself. Just totally let go and it will come again. Don’t touch it, he warned himself, let it dry. Add to it tomorrow. Maybe something as simple as a stain. An iridescent stain? Drips of tar which could bleed through time? Definitely leave it alone until after a couple of bottles of wine. The wine will give you the answer. Remember to bring wine tomorrow.
He stumbled back to his ancient blue truck, dented extravagantly by hail on a trip through Ohio to save Alex, and hummed as he drove side streets to his house. Being able to avoid traveling on an interstate was why he rented the studio he did. That and it was dirt cheap. It didn’t have air conditioning or insulation and was unusable during summer heat waves. It got so hot that the wood panels he used to paint on warped and his paint dried solid in the tube. A small price to pay for staying off the freeways. Two DUIs were quite enough, thank you. He pulled up in front of his house, parking on the pot-holed street in the shade of a sycamore tree rather than on his sun drenched driveway. He was tired of replacing windshield wipers baked into hard plastic by the sun. The falling sycamore sap didn’t bother him. It dried a nice amber color. The little blobs fit nicely with the pits from hail. How did Alex describe it? “Rich pattern of textures privileged on a field of faded blue enamel.”
Collecting the bills and fliers from the mail box by the door, he trudged slowly to his kitchen, through the piles of dirty clothes and unopened junk mail and empty diet soda cans. In the kitchen, he tugged at a small wooden door he had rescued from a demolition site. Lori rescued broken men. He saved small doors from landfills. The entire kitchen was his collection, populated with these small doors, each a different wood, a different color, a different era. He thought it was kind of festive. It could be an installation project if he took the time to photograph it properly. Hondo had wanted to shoot it and juxtapose it with a tower of take-out containers, but then his grandmother had had them hauled away when he was in rehab and it never happened. He had one of Hondo’s fancy cameras. Maybe now that he was feeling more like himself again he’d take some shots tomorrow.
Behind the little green door which scraped the floor every time it opened was a stack of bottles of expensive wine, a trade with a winery. His dealer had convinced him he needed to be in their collection. So a small fortune in wine filled his lower cabinets and he wasn’t supposed to drink. The doctor warned him that Nardil does not play well with alcohol or chocolate or caffeine or cheese. But what did doctors know? He consumed considerable quantities of coffee and cheese every day and no bogey man came to get him. The doctor insisted that to stay sane and relatively free of anxiety attacks and the new phobia of the dark, he needed to take three Nardil pills every day. When he explained to the doctor that the Nardil was the worst of the lot about killing any impulse to make art, the doctor told him to give it time. And what did time do? He was transforming head first into a beige marshmallow. How could a marshmallow create art? He tried to explain this to his local gallery director two days ago when she asked about a new body of work. “This body is no longer mine.” When he began pulling off his clothes to show her what had happened to his body, he saw her backing away from him and stopped. “This is not me,” he yelled at her, shaking the mass of folds around his belly. He was lean, not this. This was a conspiracy against him, he had screamed at her. Some pharmaceutical executive hated his paintings, his success and had poisoned him with this medication. Without fluidity in his motions, he could not paint. He had left the gallery after she threatened to call the police. Walking away had helped, though. He really needed to exercise more. He really was so close to being totally out of control. At home, dismally sober, he had stood in front of a mirror and anointed himself Marshmallow Man, complete with a cloak of invisibility. Definitely not in the front of the line to become one of Marvel’s Superheroes, at least not until he could come up with a really cool costume and a hot sidekick. And a superpower. Unless the ability to stare for days on end at blank canvases was a superpower. Yeah, Marshmallow Man. He could see himself in white tights with a bubble wrap cape juggling flaming marshmallows. He started laughing. It was so good to laugh again. He needed to laugh.
That was the night he decided to take control of his life again by not refilling the prescription. He celebrated with a couple of bottles of wine. Today he actually felt himself. He was still alone and fat but that would change. His talent would come back too. This new start in the studio filled him with hope. With success, the girls would come back. The sales would come back. Lori would be sorry she left him.
As hard as he tried, though, he couldn’t stay mad at Lori. He texted her admitting that Alex was right, self pity was stopping him and he had started new work. If these really started working, maybe he could convince her to dump her husband and start painting again.
He took the corkscrew and a bottle of Syrah to the porch he built in the backyard. The wine didn’t taste right – keeping it at the right temperature was impossible without air conditioning. And air conditioning cost too much. That old unit in his bedroom window couldn’t begin to cool the whole house. Hell, any temperature over 95 and it became nothing more than a decorative touch, a tastefully contrasting colored box blocking the view from the window. “Fuck it,” he told his backyard, guzzling down half of the bottle with the final orange pill, watching the flowers detach from the bougainvillea around the porch, the bright pink now browned and brittle, so light they floated across the dirt, twirling in the hot breeze. Lori had planted them and he had neglected them. The vines were barely alive. The dead blossoms were beautiful, though, pirouetting and leaping. His mind felt the same way – so light he could feel it twirl and dip. Yes, he had missed the buzz of alcohol. Maybe he should eat something, though. The tannic acid was making his stomach queasy. Best to order a pizza for delivery. Shit, how stupid. He’d left his wallet at the studio. Of course the cabinets were empty and he shouldn’t drive back to the studio after so much wine. Wine on an empty stomach. That was not smart. Well, a nap would probably kill the heartburn and afterward he could haul a bottle or two of the wine over to the studio, order a pizza from there and finally paint. These new ones would scream of destiny and anger.
He stretched out on the cheap plastic chaise, wedging himself between pillows, and never woke up.