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Arts & Entertainment

The Long Vietnam of My Soul, Part 7-a

Basilio contented himself smoking pot, listening to Elmore James, drinking huge glasses of water and painting bricks that day—the Saturday of the holiday weekend, May 28th—until he saw Elisabeth sneak into the basement door of her house.

Chapter 8

Basilio’s greatest work, the paintings on which his reputation would rest, lay on the far side of his cousin’s long and tragic summer in Baltimore. Tragic may be too charitable. Someone with a better sense of composition—someone not in love with both the pot and the kettle—might simply dismiss it as ridiculous  . . .

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                                                -o-

Memorial Day weekend, 1988.

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Nieves left behind six primitive paintings—something more than juvenilia, falling short of the fundamentals Basilio tried to teach her—on scrolls of butcher paper tacked to the walls of the front room above G&A Coney Island Hot Dogs.

They are likely still there to this day, spared the dumpster because gentrification has yet to come to that stretch of the Holy Land.

Two were of the Greek grocery—Stella Foods with the cheeses hanging from the ceiling—across Eastern Avenue; one was a still life—two chili dogs "all the way" next to a plate of French fries with brown gravy; and three, done in kiddie markers, were of Elisabeth: dressed, half-dressed, and fully nude.

The young women—Nieves younger than Elisabeth by a few months, Elisabeth younger in maturity by years—tortured Basilio with Polaroid snapshots of the G&A portraits: leaving copies under his studio door while he worked on canvases they would have bet their eyes were about them.

                                                  -o-

 

                                                        The absent love of my life

                                                        Bleeding across beams

                                                       Drifts along the ocean breeze

 

                                                   -o-

In fact, only every third painting concerned Nieves and, since his cousin had arrived, Elisabeth was relegated to every fourth.

The day the Polaroid photographs were slipped beneath the door with barely hushed giggles—Basilio looking down the stairs in time to see two rear-ends disappear, one skinny and one less so, Grandpop grumbling in the kitchen—he was painting an inventory.

On the porous brick of the studio walls, he used the brightest white paint sold at Kurek’s hardware on O’Donnell Street, one that reflected more than 98 percent of all available light.

Once he’d cut a hole in the roof above the studio—"you can’t turn on lights?” asked a woman he’d walked away from after Nieves arrived, “but you cut out the roof of the house?”—light was always available to Basilio, even in the dead of night.

[For Nieves, the dead of night would in time become just that: dead/dark.]

Where on the continuum was the Fountain of Highlandtown?

Somewhere between half and three-quarters of the pigment used to paint with oil is white. White holds a work together the way Basilio was not holding the Macon Street household together as he’d promised the family when he moved in with Grandpop.

On each brick of the wall facing Elisabeth’s house across the alley, Basilio used Duron Pure White to record an object languishing in Grandpop’s house when he moved in on Chirstmas Day 1987; the morning after his brief marriage blew up in his face like a clown cigar.

[There was once a family of crime-fighting manic-depressive clowns in the neighborhood, or so they said in the Greek gambling houses up on the Avenue.

Basilio had long intended to buy enough drinks, trade enough sketches or sit over as many cups of coffee as necessary to find out if it was true. But Elisabeth caught his self-pitying eye and then Nieves landed like a sinking armada from Spain and now, well, now he is too busy making an indelible inventory of every item in Grandpop’s house to follow up on much of anything.]

One glass knick knack in the shape of a rooster; one bottle, almost empty, of Fundador cognac; one “Spirit of ‘76" decanter with one of the drum sticks broken off; one coin bank promoting Cadillac dog food (though, as far as Basilio knew, Grandpop never owned a dog); five decks of Bicycle playing cards, two of the them for pinochle; one gas station highway map of Pennsylvania (Basilio’s deceased grandmother, Francesca, was from Aliquippa); two eight-track tapes of bullfight music (no tape player of any kind in the house); a pipe threader; a bottle cap crimper; 27 red pencils—taken one at a time from the Sparrows Point shipyard—of various lengths; two staplers, one green and one gray; two boxes of staples; a contraption to remove the meat of a tomato from its seeds (that is what Basilio wrote on the wall because he didn’t know what it was called; one Arrow 77 beer hanging thermometer; and on and on and one.

Basilio contented himself smoking pot, listening to Elmore James, drinking huge glasses of water and painting bricks that day—the Saturday of the holiday weekend, May 28th—until he saw Elisabeth sneak into the basement door of her house.

By then, her mother was long exasperated by watching her grandchildren two hours longer than she’d agreed and Elisabeth’s short-tempered husband—a man who assumed Basilio was gay because he’d painted the fence in the yard pink and yellow—was circling the city looking for a piece-of-shit station wagon carrying one hot blonde in a bob and one hot Spaniard with shoulder-length hair as black as an olive.

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