Purity phase

I entered some kind of strange purity phase where the walls in my bedroom became too cluttered to stand. All my favorite things that I thought were so cool now I wanted them all out. Not completely out, just off the walls so everything was removed and I painted it bone white and now the whole room with hardly anything in it looked clinically Spartan.

I sat there on the bed and pondered staring at the blank wall imagining the most fantastic thing I can think of to put there. What would it be? Of anything in the whole world what would it be? I thought and thought and pondered for days. Back and forth to work then home, I'd sit on the edge of the bed and imagine what should go up on the wall. I had plenty of burgeoning ideas but nothing spectacular. I can have one thing. Only one good thing and that's it. It must be the best thing I can think of and pull off.
I recalled in details a house I visited in Aspen. Though I cannot recall why my friends were there while the owners were not. I think the house might have been for sale. It seemed odd touring the whole house marveling all over at its accruements discussing them without the owner there. Turns out the house is owned by woman divorcing her husband who is curator of one of the New York museums, I forget which one, and the couple also owned a shop in town also part of the settlement but I did not know that until after we left the house and went there I saw a lot of the same things there in the Aspen shop as in the house, extravagant antler chandelier, you've seen them but I've not seem anything huge as this with hundreds of racks of antlers for just one light.. Outrageous clusters of antlers that take up an entire room of a regular house. Large Black Forest type carved wooden mirror frames, surely one of a kind until I saw a second inside the shop,  with all kind of coo-coo clock type detail all around, squirrels, acorns, leaves, pinecones, all carved high detail in wood  and large as door. Larger than a regular door. All kinds of bizarre items everywhere, in every nook of the house and every cranny something unusual, something extraordinary. Wherever the eye rested, something amazing. Bocci balls individuated by thousands of tacks hammered in patterns, sometimes with numbers and others geometric design each one weighing some five pound. And we all concluded it's just flat not fair that people so well connected to access items forbidden from import by the rest of us, like preColumbian clay figures set in a row in a bathroom! And they're real! Not knock offs. Real antelope heads mounted high on living room wall overlooking the spacious airy living room apparently enjoying the view of Ajax mountain outside beyond gobbling up the whole window view,  from up there lined up high on the wall. Not Colorado game. African game. That room was all exotic animal items the likes of which you will not see. Curios, conversation pieces, and boy do they ever evoke conversation, a cleaned tiger's skull inlayed with gems and held together with etched silver. It looked martial. Like a movie prop from Predator.  With the teeth showing down to the bone without any tiger gum, the skull looks like a sabertooth tiger. It does. We were guessing about it possibly being fossilized sabertooth tiger and decided it must be regular tiger. The teeth are HUGE. The skull sits there looking like a decorated sabertooth tiger skull and the table itself is an animal theme brass plate and so is the sofa animal theme and so is the chair and so are the rugs as are the gigantic real four and half-foot turtle shells leaning up against a wall stacked as medieval shields.

There was one thing in that room that held my attention for very long while that was the most reasonable of all the pieces, one that could be replicated, an African headdress of shiny black feathers mounted splayed against a flat black matt in museum box Plexiglas frame. 98% Black on black. A large black patch on the wall treated respectfully with its own lighting. You must go right up to it in order to discern the pattern and go, "Oh wow, feather!" Shiny against matt black. Few not so colorful beads and stones and rudimentary leatherwork in thin rough straps. Far less showy than American Indian headdresses, less bright, less feathers, less colors, less beads, and much less leather, but raw as all h-e-double Congo drumsticks. Fascinating. I didn't even know African tribes had feather headdresses. I wanted that. I still do. It's still an idea to try to copy.

I sat there on my bed night after night and thought and thought and thought. It pissed me off that Aspen guy can get his hands on things that are illegal. It pissed me off enough to want to go to Egypt and pull off of a piece of plaster from a tomb wall and frame it. That's what I wanted to do. What I imagined the Aspen guy would do. And then I recalled the frescos we made at Camp Drake at Tokyo. We were taught to pour wet plaster into a shoebox and let it set. The next class we painted the surface  with watercolors and learned about frescos. Then we took our shoebox frescos home and used them as chalk to mark the black asphalt streets all over the entire Momote Village. I already made one such fresco in the Egyptian style for Toni. The page in the book that she gave me. I copied it exactly.  I have a page in my own original book that also has my attention. If I could have my perfect painting for this wall then it would be that page in the book. That's what I'll do.

I had my perfect painting and I loved it so. I didn't care what anyone else thought of it. I made what I wanted. I discovered a way to display them that I like. I expected it to be rejected by everyone else and I just flat didn't care. I will tell you, none of my family understands any of this. All they've ever known is that I like Egyptian stuff and that's as far as their curiosity take them. They think I'm strange and they tolerate me and my eccentricities. They know I'm strange and they tolerate my strange ways. They have nothing to say about things like this. They have no idea I read Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs and they couldn't care less.

This is not the painting I did.  That one was larger. Too large. I stared at my finished painting so long that I detailed every flaw. I'm a real nit-picker. I took all the fun out of my own painting by nit-picing it to death. One foot was longer than another, one hand too small, The whole thing too large for the composition. I picked it apart and convinced myself I must try again smaller this time and more precise, watch out for those details. I hosted a lot of parties at the house at the time. By then so many people had seen the first version and did not reject it, marveled in fact, didn't care about my nit-picking problems with it, responded completely differently than I expected, than my family does, and I had already sold several by then so I sold that one too at the first offer just to make it go away so I could paint it all over again.

I want to do it again but bigger next time. Because this one is too small.

See how we are?

The bedroom was painted bone white in a purity effort and now that effort extended to the hallway. Then the same effort is extended to the living room, and so on, in this manner until the whole house was repainted, room by room, gallon by gallon, one room at a time, it took a long time to complete this purity kick with all the other things going on.

During that period I ran into Mike at the Hardware store. Mike is retired, partially. He lives half the time in Denver and the other half in Mexico. He owned some fourteen homes here in town at the time and rented them all out except one. He'll take a house and break it into smaller apartments and rent them all out. It's a lot of work since he does most handiwork himself. That's how he amassed his fortune I suppose. One house is a lot, I think, fifteen of them is too much trouble. Mike proves this.  Later, after he bought a home that I lived in myself and broke it up into three apartments I regarded Mike as a slumlord but that would come later.

"What are you up to, Mike?"

"Roller painting a ceiling." I too was painting ceilings but I didn't end up looking like a Seurat sketch. He's spinning his roller. Dare I tell him? No. Just like the kids on first day of kindergarden all painting a circus scene on their individual easels to be collected for one huge circus, dripping all over because they all overloaded their brushes. Drips running down all over the whole classroom. Every single student was painting a drippy circus picture. It drove me nuts. Dare I tell them? Yes. Do any good back then? No. Mike filled me in on all the details of a rental unit gone bad. One thing after another with this troublesome renter, one thing on top of another. A slumlord's work is never completed.

"How did you get here, Mike?"

"I drove the truck."

"Lemme see your glasses." 

"Why?'

"Just give them to me. I want to check something."  He handed me his glasses. I pulled a handkerchief from my back pocket wiped them clean and handed them back. 

"Jesus Christ, I can see."

It's a miracle. I didn't know it but Mike owns little places outside of town too. I did know of his places in Puerto Vallarta but I did not know of his condos in Colorado resort towns. At the hardware store Mike invited me to join him and a few of his friends to come up with him to his place at Rocky Mountain National Park. Turns out, not Estes Park but a condo development that is actually inside the National Park. At least we drove through it to get there.

They are all ordinary places. Nothing at all impressive except for their number. I must say this condo of Mike's where we stayed was completely ordinary in every way. Three floors, hot tub, decks here and there, ordinary size. It accommodated 10 people that trip. We were fairly tightly packed.

I was ill. I should not have gone. Mike insisted. I honestly think Mike thought this might be my last. I coughed all weekend, the 'oh my God this guy's gonna die' kind of cough, perfectly miserable health-wise so I just bundled up and made the best of being up there but everything was off due to that. I recall in the morning seeing Mike standing there on a wet floor at the back door in stocking feet staring out to pine wooded forest and it gave me the shivers just thinking of his discomfort.

"Doesn't that give you the creeps?

"What give me the creeps?"

"Standing in cold water with your socks all wet and creepy."

"No. It feels good. I like it."

Weirdo. There was a guy there a guest of Mike's named Gary who I didn't know, younger than myself and bugging the piss out of me the whole time and I do not know why he could not see nor understand I was so ill and take sympathy, but he didn't. He just kept at it.  I kept blowing him off and he kept returning for more abuse, then he become taciturn, then he'd bug me more in childish nonsensical ways then receive my abuse then repeat the whole thing over and over and over and I wondered, "What is UP with this guy? What in the fuck is this guy's bag?" Then I realized.

BLAM

He wants attention. He wants direct personal attention from me and he cannot be emotionally satisfied until he gets it. He's a child.  That's all. Like a girl. Like a child. Like a dog. *Pepé Le Pew voice* "It is the little boy in 'eem no? Ee leiks to play ze game of prodiguer l'attention sur moi."  I'm trapped here in this living hell, this beautiful place with fine people but I am too ill for it, too ill for this emotionally stunted person in need of attention. From me. Directly. I know what I'll do. I'll give it. Sick as I am, just overcome it and give the guy personal attention. Like I do with my dog. Just me and her. I recalibrated and directed my attention to Gary personally and only to Gary. I asked all kind of personal questions, tenderly and softly as one truly interested, and showed probing insight and playfulness. I joked and teased a bit and that was that. Gary got bored with me quite fast It's all he wanted and he was satisfied with so little. Gary returned to normal. The personal attention delivered directly to Gary fixed the whole thing and I returned to my pulmonary misery without any further hassle from Gary. I never saw Gary after this.

That was then when I was still a nice person and when I was stuck up there in the mountains with no good escape. Now I could not possibly do that, my patience is gone, used up and in deficit. Gary is least of the trolls I've endured since that episode. Now the Garys of the world get nothing. There is just no time, no energy for nonsense left anymore.