Heather Palmer had, however, attracted some attention, even though the wedding had taken place in Palo Alto. The bride boasted some pedigree: her mother was a stalwart of the DAR, and her late father had been a diplomat of note, serving in Colombia, Brazil, and Panama, where the new Mrs. Cadmus had been born. Nothing I hadn't already known.
I returned the microfilms and left the library at three forty-five. Downtown traffic, always viscous at that hour, had congealed into static bands of steel. Orange-vested construction crews were ripping up the streets - some contractor had a friend at City Hall - and detour signs had been laid on the asphalt with sadistic randomness. It took forty minutes to travel the half mile to Los Angeles Street, and by the time I got there I was tense and hostile. The proper attitude, I supposed, for a confrontation with new-wave art.
Voids Will Be Voids was a one-storey storefront painted a flat black that the elements had streaked watery grey. Its sign was an exercise in dysgraphia - cramped black letters over turquoise plywood windows, frosted with dirt. The other buildings on the block were discount clothing outlets, and the gallery appeared to have served that same purpose before the days of artistic enlightenment. Most of the shops were closed or closing, darkened facades hiding behind accordion grilles. A few remained open, luring bargain hungers with racks of downscale threads that clogged the sidewalk. I parked the Seville in a U-Pay lot, dropped a couple of dollars into the slotted box, and went in.
The place was a studied attempt at anti-aesthetics. The floor was filthy linoleum, sticky and peppered with discarded cigarette butts. A stale clothes-cumin odour filled the air. The ceiling was low and sprayed with something that looked like spoiled cottage cheese. The alleged artwork hung haphazardly and crookedly from unpainted drywall, lit from above by bare fluorescent tubes that made some pieces glare reflectively while obscuring others. Cheap stereo speakers blared forth something that sounded like a robot mating dance - synthesised squeaks and squeals over a shifting metallic drumbeat. In the rear right-hand corner sat a man at a school desk, doodling and cutting newspaper. He ignored my entry.
The stuff on the walls was crude and mean-spirited. No doubt some art critic would find it primally raw and pulsing with vibrant youthful hostility, but to my unschooled eye it was just as David Krohnglass had guessed: of the emperor's clothing genre.
Someone named Scroto had created a set of primitive pencil drawings - stick figures and jagged lines. Develop-mentally at the four-year level, but no four-year-old I'd ever met had gleefully portrayed gang rape and mutilation. The pictures were drawn on cheap pulp paper so thin that the pencil had ripped through in several places - part of the message, no doubt - but the frames were another story: ornate, carved gilt, museum quality.
A second collection featured sloppily done acrylic portraits of pin-headed men with idiotic facial expressions and enormous penises shaped like salamis. The artist called her/himself Sally Vador Deli and used a tiny green pickle for the letter l. Next to the salami men was a sculpture consisting of an aluminium rod taken from a pole lamp, bedecked with paper clips and staples, and entitled The Work Ethic. Beyond that hung a huge shellacked collage of recipes snipped from supermarket magazines and frankly gynaecologic Hustler centrefolds.
Gary Yamaguchi's works were at the back. He now called himself Garish, and his art consisted of a series of tableaux utilising Barbie and Ken dolls and other assorted objects encased in amorphous rocks of clear plastic. One featured the all-American couple sitting in the body cavity of a rotted fish teeming with maggots and was titled Let's Eat Out Tonight in Japtown: Sashimi Trashimi. Another showed two pairs of dolls sitting, decapitated, in a red convertible, the four heads lined up neatly on the hood, a cardboard mushroom cloud filling a black crepe background. Double Date and Heavy Petting: Hiroshima-Nagasaki. In a third, Barbie had been given an Asian appearance - black geisha wig, slant accents around the eyes - and dressed in an aluminium foil kimono. She sat
spread-legged on the edge of a bed, smoking and reading a book, oblivious of the attentions of a combat- fatigued Ken's mouth to the juncture of her plastic thighs. Ooh, Lookie-Lookie! Kabookie Nookie!
But it was the last and largest piece - a chunk of Lucite two feet square - that caught my attention. In it Gary had constructed a sixties teenage bedroom scene in miniature. One-inch scraps of notepaper became lipstick- stained love letters; triangular snips of felt made football pennants; a tiny Beatles stamp served as a poster. The floor was a litter of thimble-sized pill vials, tiny photos of Barbie, and a disproportionately large cracked leather book upon which had been scrawled 'Diary' in lavender grease pencil.
Amid this clutter was the centrepiece: a Ken doll hanging from a Popsicle stick rafter, a noose around its neck. Red paint had been used to simulate blood, and there was plenty of it. Someone had believed that mere hanging was too good for Ken; a toy knife jutted from the doll's abdomen. Small pink hands clutched its handle. In case anyone missed the point, a pile of bloody viscera was coiled at the corpse's feet. The intestines were fashioned from rubber tubing and glazed with something that simulated slime. The effect was disturbingly real.
The title affixed to this bit of self-expression was Oh, Dearie, Round-Eyes Hara-Kiri: The Wretched Act. Price tag: $150.
I turned away and walked to the man at the school desk. He had short dark hair striped maroon and electric blue on the sides, elfin ears through which safety pins had been inserted, and a hard, hungry shark face dominated by narrow, empty eyes. He was in his late twenties - too old for the teen-age rebel game - and I wondered what he'd played at before discovering that in L.A., looking bizarre could camouflage a host of bad intentions.
He drew triangles and crossed them out, continuing to ignore me.
'I'm interested in one of your artists,' I said.
Grunt.
'Garish.'
Snort.
'You gotta talk to the owner. I just sit here and watch the place.' It was the sneering voice of the phone message.
'Who's the owner?'
'Doctor from Encino.'
'When does he come in?'
An apathetic shrug punctuated by a yawn.
'Never.'
'He never comes in at all?'
'No, man. This is like ... a hobby.'
Or a tax writeoff.
'I don't get down here too often,' I said, 'so I'd appreciate if you'd call him and say I'd like to buy one of Garish's tableaux.'
He looked up, stared, and stretched. I noticed old needle marks on his arms.
'The one with the suicide scene,' I continued. 'The Wretched Act. I'd also like to talk to the artist.'
'Tableaux.' He grinned. His mouth was a disaster zone, several teeth missing, the few that remained, chipped and brown. 'That's life, man. That's garbage. Not any tableaux.'
'Whatever. Would you make the call, please?'
'Not supposed to. He's like in surgery all the time.'
'How about cash-and-carry and an extra hundred thrown in for commission?' I took out my wallet.
At that he grew sullen.
'Yeah, sure. Cash for trash.' He feigned apathy, but his eyes had come alive with anticipation, and he held out a grubby hand. 'You want it that bad, it's yours for two fifty.'
'Talking to Garish is part of the deal. Find him for me, and we're in business.'
'This is Voids,' he whined, 'not any freaking missing persons scam.'
'Have him here by six, and the commission goes up to one fifty.'
He licked his lips and tapped his pencil against the desktop.
'Think you can buy me, huh, man?' 'I'm betting on it.'
'Trying to put me in your tableau, Mr. Suit?' I ignored him and feigned nonchalance. 'I can find him without you,' I said, 'but I want to see him today. If you can arrange it, the hundred and fifty's yours.'
The striped head bobbed and weaved. 'Why the freak should I know where he is?'
'You're exhibiting his stuff on consignment. If I buy the piece, you'll owe him his share. Something tells me you communicate once in a while.'
