By the time he stopped to examine where he was, how he’d gotten there, and any otherwise and ancillary etceteras, it was too late for him to do anything to fix his situation. He looked around the room at the wreckage. He knew that even irony was nowhere to be found and that it was only a matter of time before his life was simply over, at least as he currently understood it. He could hear them outside, approaching, with the dogs. Having gotten used to thinking “I can fix this,” across a wide and indeterminate series of predicaments, he knew there was no thinking that this time.

Another year of sobriety couldn’t fix this. Apart from a bribe, there was nothing that could get him out of there. He had four dollars left in his bank account. He had spent 1,200 dollars in the last six hours going through ten bundles. He swept the remaining green baggies off the table, put them in his mouth and pushed them down his throat with nothing to drink. Swallowing, he looked up at the ceiling with both conceit and paranoia, touching his lip which had split from the once hot stem now resting cold on the table. If only there was only a way get to the roof, he thought. I’ve gotten away from them that way before. He was right. He had. But that had been nearly three years ago, two days deep on a completely different binge, before the crackdown, before the city had an interactive murder map for the public to use to tally the death toll. Then was a time in step with luck. He scanned the room. There was no luck in it. There was nothing in this room but calamity.

Before the crackdown, before the murder map, before critics were artists, before the blog, Nicholas Paige was finishing college with neither a career nor any particular ambition apart from his love for painting. He had every intention of sticking to not knowing exactly what he wanted to do with his life inasmuch as he knew what he did not. It was, in all, that he did not want that he found himself defined, just as it was in making every effort not to become a stereotype, that he became one. All that looking back could do was remind him of opportunity misplaced. This came as a dull punch line to what seemed like a terrific joke to him, especially since, if he had the opportunity for a do-over, he was unsure what he would change. Even worse, Nicholas feared that what he might do differently would result in an even worse disappointment with his adult life. Suddenly, there he was, 38, creeping on middle age, another man whose once vast choices had been whittled down to mere compliance and necessity. He now moved forward to face what was there regardless of whether or not it was what he wanted from life. Things such as hopes, dreams, and aspirations were now mere casualties dead and buried in a graveyard in the back of his mind.

It didn’t start out that way, of course. What Nicholas wanted from life was to be a painter. But he saw painting as a hobby for the wealthy and a career for spurious artists who paid more attention to the social scene that revolved around painting than to painting itself. And so he kept up with his painting, despite the fact that a means of survival through it felt untenable and simply unrealistic. It was, in all, that for which he did not care that he found reality and, bit by bit, a way thereby to function along with so many other people who had, likewise, in the recesses of their minds, graveyards full of dead hopes, dreams, and aspirations.

After waiting tables for a few years after college, he’d backed into his first position, not for an architectural firm, but a starchitectural firm, who, before they hired him, put him through a laggard and involved interview process. There was no way of knowing that his first salaried position would become a career and in ten years time, he would sit and reminisce about the interview, which went a little something like this:

“Nicholas, we don’t want you to work here just because you need a job, m’kay? I mean, I do this work because architecture is my life,” said the Director of Business Development, who had a certain 80’s, James Spader tone of careless condescension in his voice, which seemed incapable of change, regardless of message.

“Well,” Nicholas replied with a slow and single nod, taking his time so that he could adopt the straightforward sort of tone that one ought to use in response to any sort of condescension, “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t applying because I need a job. I think it’s pretty clear that I need a job. I’m sitting in a room interviewing for one. As for my life, well, painting is my life. I like architecture, and I believe I’ll learn to like it more. Whether or not it will be ‘my life’ I cannot say. It might.”

And so it did. Become his life.

It might have been his approach to the interview that got him the job. It might have been that his immediate boss attended the same school as him. It might have been the take-home tests. They had sent him home with four take-home writing assignments. Having passed those, after another month, he was offered his first salaried position. He crafted proposals, tailoring boilerplate information for both target brochures and responses to RFPs. His position even had a title: Marketing Coordinator. While this job brought with it the occasional sleepless night thanks to the intense deadlines, it also seemed to awaken a latent sense of honor in Nicholas. He liked having health insurance. He joined a gym and enjoyed the curious anonymity of exercising with headphones on. He had money to go out at night where, when people asked him what he did for a living, he wouldn’t have to say “Oh I wait tables” but could own up to his profession, even though it was merely something about which not to be ashamed instead of being something about which he was actually proud. It wasn’t what he wanted to do, but it was certain that a salaried position made his life easier. In not caring about marketing, he found himself fearless to its regard. And, fearless to its regard, before he knew it, he found him himself likewise at it successful. He couldn’t say the same for his own art.

Nicholas was never good at meeting people, talking to people, learning from people, or teaching people anything when it came to art. But his career in architecture had flourished and in ten year’s time he had stepped up the ladder of success by three rungs: Marketing Coordinator. Marketing Manager. Marketing Director. While it was a cinch for him to walk into a boardroom full of principals, shareholders, or clients, and point around at graphic layouts he’d designed for collateral materials, with renderings, site plans, elevations, comparative building evaluations, or simple taglines while charmingly endorsing these with an aloof, accompanying dialogue, he found it impossible to talk to gallery owners or even other painters about his art. He had a sense that it was a conflict of interest. He would think out loud: “I just don’t see how anyone can talk about business in relation to the art that they created. I’d need a representative or something. I don’t think the artist can even think about business, or a scene related to it, or what’s going to come of the art after it’s created. That sort of shit interferes with the creative process.” And because of this circuitous explanation, no one ever saw his work. It was a fear of failure under believable terms, a qualified excuse to keep working in a career he didn’t want since people will typically settle for any unremarkable situation before they’ll take the risk to change it for a potentially worse position in life.

But that wasn’t all that had gotten him into his predicament in that room with the police and their dogs lurking outside, closing in on him. Nicholas blamed his closet drug habit on a condition of humanity which he summed up in two words: “Elf Pants.”

Elf Pants were pants that were skin tight down to the ankles. Kids in every gentrifying neighborhood in the city were wearing them and before you knew it, pants like Levis 517s, which Nicholas liked very much, had virtually disappeared. To Nicholas, Elf Pants were the most ridiculous trend to descend upon the hipster community. They just looked so damned ridiculous! Everyone, everywhere was wearing these fucking pants. Elf Pants were for the Oughts what the pastel was for the 80s. And so it came to be that the phrase “Elf Pants” is what Nicholas would use to identify anything pertaining to politics. Politics regarding painters and galleries. Politics regarding indie rock and writers. Politics regarding brands. Politics regarding bankers. Politics regarding politics. Nicholas was convinced that everything which was made fashionable was so made with political engineering. Over the last ten years he had watched painters, writers, and indie rockers, and all the fashions they adopted and dropped all together at once a few years later as though notified to do so via office-wide memo, all the while and mocking “trendiness,” rather, purporting to be completely opposed to it. But an opposition to trends via the creation of another trend made such little sense to Nicholas that it actually made him angry. It was worse than organized anarchy. These people were a mockery of themselves and they didn’t even know it.

It wasn’t long before it followed that trends started being mocked in blogs. Nicholas couldn’t stand the blogs. To him, blogs were a harbinger of things much worse to come. “Opinions are not facts!” he would shout out loud in thought to himself, sitting silent as he read them. And, “These people are being called writers! Just for mocking shit!” But there they were, the blogs, tracking the trends of all that he’d come to hate: The hipsters at their galleries, the shots of the people at secret parties on the photo-sites with young and careless looking people everywhere, wasted and for it, celebrated. The lot of them in Elf Pants, looking appropriately bored with their very own uselessness. Then, worse, the bloggers were recycling that uselessness with parody, making fun of it and calling the making fun of it an art. Or worse, celebrating it. And yet… Nicholas continued to read the blogs, unable to resist as though his cubicle were a cell and the blogs were morsels of food, placed at foot of the gate. He couldn’t resist reading about trends because he so abhorred them and while he knew it was wrong to laugh at uselessness, he kept doing it because he hated trends. Nicholas hated trends with an animosity unrivaled by anything else apart from corrupt civic authority and unwarranted fees. The politics involved in trends, to him, were the same politics that were reported on blogs, the same ones that made careers and took them away. He believed that it was because he could not participate in this scene that he had failed as a painter. When he thought of this fact, he realized that it went against everything he felt to be true about art – because secretly, he truly wanted a career as a painter and those motivations were alive in him no matter how much he struggled to suppress them. As far as he knew, people in the city weren’t even aware that he painted and the entire world seemed a paradisiacal party to which he was not invited. To the artists in the city, he assumed he was just another outsider in pants that were a shard too big around the ankles.

After his understanding of Elf Pants came the drugs. His very first binge was reactive. In fact, every binge he had was reactive. The one he was on right now was reactive, for crying out loud. But he wasn’t thinking of right now. Sitting alone in the room with only a matter of time before they got to him, he was thinking of then, as though he were his own analyst, deep in cognitive therapy on his own behalf. On his first binge, he was out with some friends from work and they were sitting at a bar in Fishtown, where Nicholas lived. Their waiter was a fellow he knew and was in a band that sounded like every other band at the time, whatever type of sound Pitchfork was rewarding with favorable review. Nicholas and his co-workers were drinking pints of Yuengling all around and when the waiter dropped off the glasses, Nicholas said hello.

“Hey Josh. Thanks,”

“Oh hey Nick. No problem,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Not too bad. Same old shit. Architects. Graphics. Words. How’s your band?”

“Pretty good. We’ve just finished our record.”

“Congrats. That’s great. Are you playing anytime soon,” asked Nick, feeling like that was what he was supposed to say.

“Yeah, we might be opening for Arcade Fire when they come through next time. And then we have to hook up a record release party and all that.”

“Wow, that’s pretty cool. You guys, this is my friend Josh. He’s in this really great band called The Sweetness,” he said, staring straight ahead with utter disbelief at his own words. He had no idea what The Sweetness sounded like and was, in fact, surprised that he even remembered the name. “Josh’s band once opened for The Strokes,” he said, continuing uncomfortably like someone put on the spot looking for validation, “and he’s the first guy who told me about Coldplay,” he finished with a swallow of the few drops of beer he thought he already swallowed.

“Coldplay? Really? I doubt that. Man that was such a long time ago. I can’t imagine ever liking Coldplay.”

“No, you had a demo copy before anyone else knew about it because your friend worked at Capitol Records or whatever, right? I think you even burned me a copy of it. I remember feeling so awesome because of that, because the band blew up like six months later but I had a copy of their demo when they were unknown. It was like I knew a secret no one else knew or something,” he said, looking at the floor, checking Josh’s jeans. And there they were. Elf Pants.

“Yeah, well, their first album, that one you’re talking about, isn’t all that bad I guess, but I can’t imagine ever actually liking them. They’re so safe and boring.” said Josh.

“Yeah, I think I read that in Pitchfork,” said Nick, getting obviously testy because he had read that in Pitchfork and now it was just sort of going around. Like a trend. “Anyway, congrats on finishing your record.”

“Thanks man! I gotta get back to work. I’m a little in the weeds,” he said.

“Right on. Hey – I like your pants,” Nick said suddenly, looking down at the pants and shaking his head with a smirk of disbelief in the proxy of what should have been obnoxious laughter.

“Thanks. I just got these from that boutique that’s going to open in a few weeks in Kensington,” he said, shifting to move.

“Kensington? Well, I suppose the rain can make the flowers grow anywhere, can’t it? Wait, you got them from a boutique that isn’t open yet? How’d you do that?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he said over his shoulder, the words trailing off as he walked away.

That was it. Nick was downright riled after that, had a few too many of those Yeunglings and did a little of the coke his friend had, and suddenly found himself right wasted in a few short hours. Not because he was embarrassed. Not because that kid pissed him off with his inability to think for himself. And not even because he knew that Josh probably loved Coldplay once upon a time because someone else told Josh he was supposed to love them which, one could argue gave Josh the right, in fact, to hate them. But it wasn’t Coldplay that made Nick want to do drugs. It was Elf Pants. Elf Pants summed up culture in a convenient two-word definition while stirring the latent animosity in Nicholas, who was now all but certain that he was a failure. So, that night on his way back to his place, instead of staying straight on Girard and driving the few remaining blocks to his house, he took a left under the El. He had always seen the drug dealers beneath the Market/Frankford Line in Kensington. He drove beneath the El, picked up a drug dealer, and asked if he knew where he could get any coke. He said he did, only the dude wasn’t talking about powder. That was Nicholas’s first time in a crack house and he didn’t go home until he spent the last money the cash machine would let him take out of it.

After a few months, and a few more lefts at the El, Nicholas referred to the intersection at Girard Avenue and Front Street as his crossroads. He endured a year of fighting the urges to make that left, urges that grew stronger than he could share, control, or even explain – it felt like something bigger than him. After being threatened with a gun by a Puerto Rican thug who stole his car, he went sober. He quit drinking for a year and focused on his painting. He had been off the shit for a year before growing tired of the monastic and reclusive feeling that accompanied his bouts of sobriety. And now, here he was, in the same old place all over again. Cars with blue plates would follow him around for hours, if he could just get out of the house.

An hour had passed since Nick had given his last $120 for a bundle to a girl with her jaw wired shut because her boyfriend had knocked it that way. Her boyfriend was dead now, slain with the blunt side of an axe one week prior by a drug dealer on a rip, and right in front of a cop on the take who let it all happen. “And he was just sitting here on this very couch a week ago!” said the girlfriend, pointing at the couch upon which Nick was seated. Nick was waiting for the tears to come, and wondered how she might wipe them off through the wire holding her jaw shut, while holding a crack pipe. But the tears never came because there was still rock in the pipe. Nobody really cries until the stuff runs out, when they become defiantly isolated in anxiety.

After she left to go cop more rock, he sat there staring at the floor, thinking of the odd sides of axes and the way the paint chips off of them. His heart was still racing. After an hour had passed he knew the girl wasn’t coming back. He thought of things like probation and handcuffs. And with that thought, he got up to walk out of the door and face the situation.

Just as he got to the door, the Puerto Rican girl returned with an arm waving, and a story, pushing him back to his seat without touching him. While she was out copping the rock, she said, the cop on the take, the one who was in on her boyfriend’s murder, confronted her and threatened her.

“I wanna kill that motherfucker!” she said without any particular meaning. The cop knew that she knew he was in on the murder and he had simply told her to keep quiet about it until it all blew over.

“I think I’m gonna split,” said Nick.

“What? Why? I got a bundle right here! Well, minus two,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m just, like, done. Had enough.”

She hit the pipe and Nicholas could feel his heart beating like it was a barge giving a tow to the rest of his body which felt like a tiny row boat. He wanted a hit so bad, but he now knew that the cops weren’t there and that very minute was his chance to get the hell out of there.

“I just want to go home,” he said.

“Good. Bye then. Shit. More for me,” she said.

He put on his sunglasses and walked fast, working hard to control his gestures. His arms were tight against his body and his eyes were moving faster than a video game. He got in his car and started to drive away. He watched the rearview mirror more than the road in front of him. He could tell when cars were following him but he was beginning to wonder which cars were undercover police and which cars were merely driving in coincidence. In the past, the blue-plated Ford Expeditions had followed him for an entire day. He had even seen the helicopter. It followed him to the painting supply store. But today? Nothing. He drove reservedly and made the left from beneath the El, turning on Palmer to get to Frankford Ave. He looked in the mirror. Clear. He turned left on to Franford Avenue, scanning the mirror with paranoid intolerance. He was a few blocks from turning off of Frankford Avenue when, looking forward for a second, he saw some balloons, and a “GRAND OPENING” sign in the short distance that looked like a large, half-opened book facing the ground. “What is that place, I wonder,” Nick thought. He slowed the car. There were no cops anywhere.

He parked his car, got out and looked up at a new boutique which was having its grand opening. There were people there, but not as many as one might think for a grand opening celebration. The store was called “Yr Sister’s Mom.” Nicholas smirked at the name of the store and walked into it, finding an interesting space converted from a former ice cream parlor which had been dilapidated and abandoned for more than thirty years. He was approached by a girl who looked like a cross between Zooey Deschanel and… Zooey Deschanel; and as she approached him, she said, “Nicholas?”

Nicholas looked up. He stared for a minute. It was a girl he knew from many years ago, college, who had studied fine art with him at RISD. Summoning her name didn’t take long. He’d always liked her.

“Chelsea? Holy shit. Is this your store?,” he asked.

“Yeah. Yeah, we just opened. Or are opening right now, I mean. Today is the opening. Yeah, anyway, this is my little store.”

“Wow. Who knew?” pursing his lips to keep from showing they were burnt and split. “Chelsea, this is just incredible. How did you make this happen?”

“Dog-eared determination,” she said. “But I did it. And I’m so happy I did. So whatcha been up to?”

“What?” he said, stalling. Oh darlin’, he thought, if only you knew…

“Well, what?”

“Oh, uh, you know, the same stuff.”

“So you’re still painting, right?”

“Always.”

“I wish you would have shown some more of your stuff, Nick. I always liked your work when we were in school and you were always so quiet about it all. I heard you’re still being a recluse about your paintings. Holing up and saying nothing about it.”

“What?”

“I heard you’re sitting on, like, the best paintings anyone ever did anywhere and you’re not sharing them to anyone,” she said with a cautionary smile that would be flirtatious if its recipient was not so pranged that he missed it altogether.

“That’s news to me,” said Nicholas. “Imagine,” he thought, “people actually talking about the fact that I paint.” He didn’t think anyone would talk about something like that.

“You know, Nicholas, a lot of us wondered why you never showed up to the awards ceremony at graduation. I mean, you were one of the best painters that school had ever seen and easily the best in our class. Why didn’t you show up?”

“I just, um… Yeah… It just isn’t for me, that award stuff. I don’t see how anyone can get an award for something like art, which is supposed to be judged by opinion. It’s not like you can statistically calculate who deserves an award for being the ‘best’ at anything artistic. It’s just ridiculous to even consider it. So I just decided to forget that it ever happened. To forget that it was judged at all.”

“I heard this about you too. You’ve turned into a true nihilist.”

“No, on the contrary, I… Wait, who told you that?”

“Who hasn’t? So, are you one of those people now who thinks that nothing happens in this world without some sort of ulterior motive?”

“Well, I mean, I…” he said, trying to continue on a thought he hadn’t even formulated yet.

“And then you harbor this resentment for people who make something out of themselves because you see them as corrupt. You’re one of those people who thinks nothing happens naturally and that everything is connected. You don’t think there’s truth anywhere in the world, do you?”

“Well, sort of, yeah,” he said. He looked at her and remembered her being this way in college, quiet in the eyes, yet so interrogative in manner. He remembered sitting in a dormitory room with her. Living down the hall in a bubble of friends that sometimes overlapped into his bubble of friends in what now looked like architectural organization charts in his head as he thought of them, thanks to ten years of making them.

“But Nick, that’s life. People have ulterior motives when they’re so much as looking in the mirror. Even dolphins make faces when you put a mirror in front of them. Part of being a human is having motives to begin with. You’re staring at a fucking black hole, dude. You gotta show your work.”

“A black hole,” he said.

“You know what? Why don’t you…” she said, pausing to stare at him and then grabbing him by the shoulders to walk him out to the street, “let me hook it up for you? I have some friends who are opening a gallery,” she said. Pointing down the street, two doors down, where a gallery was soon to open. “They need talented artists. You are talented. It’s that simple. It’s opening in a few months. Seriously, it’s going to go in right there,” she said, still pointing. “Why don’t you just think about it, okay? Here’s my number.” And she wrote her number down on his back as he sat and wondered if she’d grown this pleasantly aggressive or if he simply missed it in college.

“Alright. I’ll call you.”

“I doubt you mean that. But I really hope you do.”

Nicholas walked home, absorbed with Chelsea and her beautiful face and her little vintage store and her stories about ulterior motives, black holes, and dolphins. Her approach to his idea of the world was alarmingly on point. He especially liked that she had said “dog-eared determination,” in response to how she had opened her own store.

And so it was that Nicholas made that call a few days later. He met the gallery owners, and they seemed like upstanding and forthright people. They didn’t seem like they were going to peddle him. And they agreed not to put a price on his paintings, something which sold Nicholas on the idea. More than anything, Nicholas wanted distance between commerce and art. As much distance as anyone could there allow and Chelsea found it for him in this gallery. He didn’t mind selling his paintings as long as he didn’t have to know about it. All he wanted was for someone else to do the money part of it for him.

Three months later, the opening was scheduled. Nicholas had stayed in touch with Chelsea. She had elaborated on her ideas about him and about the world and as this occurred, she noticed a change in Nick that she welcomed with open arms. They began dating and by the time the opening was scheduled, the two of them were all but inseparable. Nick had stopped reading the blogs. He had stopped paying attention to all the nonsense he abhorred himself for paying attention to and, found himself appropriately adjusted inasmuch as anyone might suppose able to feel. On that day, however, he did read the local blogs because, this time, they were writing about him.

They called Nick a genius who had virtually been “in hiding” since graduating with honors from RISD and allegedly refusing to show up to accept an award of the highest merit. The Kensington gallery was looking to become one of the premier independent galleries in the city, not to mention a neighborhood cornerstone, and Nicholas was one of the small handful of talented artists who could feel responsible for their coming success.

His hair stood on end as he read about himself. He felt, for the first time in his life, that he was doing what he was meant to do. As he scrolled down the blog’s page, however, he noticed another story which caught his attention. It was about a police officer who had been arrested on murder charges. The hair on Nicholas’s arms immediately went flat. As he read the story, he realized it was the same cop who had killed that girl’s boyfriend. He continued reading, half in shock. It told the whole story. The part about the blunt side of the axe. The part about the girl knowing all about it. The part about the cop telling her to keep quiet. After she told her story to the authorities, the cop in question heard about it from one of his fellow police, found the girl, and shot her. If it weren’t for all the drugs involved in the case, and the city’s need to make a statement about the recent crackdown on drugs, the officer probably would have gotten away with it. But since one resourceful young officer wanting to make his way in the force learned this story from the girl, he persisted. And on it went until the corrupt cop was indicted on murder charges.

“Hey – you wanna start thinking about getting ready, baby?” asked Chelsea. “Tonight’s your big night, stud.”

“What? Oh, right,” said Nicholas, looking up with the silent face that housed a head swimming with thoughts of couches in crack houses, cops on the take, and the now dead Puerto Rican girl. “I’m pretty ready, I suppose, at least, psychologically. Though I need to get dressed for it. Actually, I’m probably as psychologically not dressed for it as I am not physically dressed for it.”

“Well, that’s good because I got you something for you,” said Chelsea, standing behind him with a gift in her hand.

“Really?” he said. “That’s rad. I love it when you give me shit. Can I open it?”

“Yes.”

Nicholas opened the box. And there they were. Elf Pants.

“Wow. Baby, you know I can’t do Elf Pants. We’ve talked about this.”

“I know, but I’m taking it somewhere different. Okay? Remember our discussion about Rockmaster Scott?” she replied.

“What?”

“You told me that you used to stay up late at night with your old Hitachi boombox so that you could tape that old hip-hop show. You said you used to breakdance to that song ‘Request Line,’ by some group named ‘Rockmaster Scott and the Dynamic Three.’”

“Well, yeah, I mean I did, but…”

“Okay, so try them on,” she said, leaving the room.

“Alright. Fuck it. I mean, yeah, Rockmaster Scott. Right on, right?”

Chelsea found a version of “Request Line” on Ebay explicitly to go with the pants. She put it on as Nicholas put on the Elf Pants. He was looking at himself in the mirror when she returned to the room.

“They look good,” she said.

“You’re right,” he said, smiling. “They do.”

Philebrity will resume posting on Monday, August 4th.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 2:26 am.