Drawing Lesson

It’s 100 degrees. There’s traffic all the way down Fulton. What else is new.

I’m in line at C-Town. To the left, discount food. To the right, canned fish. In front, a single register with a broken conveyor belt. Behind me is a queue of pissed off shoppers. 

Meanwhile I have decided that consonants are beautiful. 

Germ. Perforate. Errant.

I list words in my head. My own name. I thought it was ugly but I’ve changed my mind about that. The grocery store music overhead is distracting.

Muffled mashed potato pop.

They ran out of baskets again. I’ve got brown cilantro, an avocado, hard limes and kombucha stacked in my arms. The kombucha bottles are very cold on my skin, but Cassandra craves guacamole so here I am.

A man knocks over a display of Entenmann's with a backpack. Who wears a backpack in here? The aisles are narrow, not sure if I mentioned it. He starts to pick up the mess. A doughnut rolls toward me but my hands are full, like I said.

The man scrabbles after crullers and it makes me uneasy. I don’t want to see him kneeling. I put in earbuds. I click on the playlist ‘Italian Alternative’ because I’m learning Italian. Italian pop isn’t inventive but it’s in Italian so that’s something. Languages form new pathways in the brain, that’s what the research says. 

A song builds with a drone and a slow beat. Here comes a deep voice, full of color. It’s a story about a girl named Betty.

-Una dose di qualcosa, una dipendenza-

Dip-en-den-z-a. All drawn out. What a long fucking word. I sense a vibration and part my eyelids. In his efforts the doughnut man has spilled a box of KitKats onto the floor.

I can’t look.

I just can’t.

Here comes the instrumental break. My thoughts wander.

My brother surfaces from the shallows. He’s almost 40. We used to fight, especially on music war Saturdays. I’d turn up my stereo and angle it towards his room and he’d reply. We made an ungodly nexus where Michael Jackson met Inner Circle. George Michael met Inner Circle. Oasis met Inner Circle. He loved Inner Circle. It was his go to. 

I’m trying to decide if I miss him.

Girl I wanna make you sweat, sweat til you can’t sweat no more.

Girl I wanna…

Girl I wanna…

I wanna smash your stereo, that’s what I wanna. Fuck Inner Circle. We fought over territory in the rental house. We were supposed to be there a couple of months while our new place got fixed up, but it was way longer than that. Long enough to learn the rental was drafty. Long enough to find the raccoon in the attic. Long enough to deal with poison ivy in the backyard. Long enough to build resentment. But the house faced a golf course and this was a perk. There was money to be made so my brother and I worked together. We found golf balls and cleaned them in the hand pumps stationed on the fairway and sold them back to the golfers. We split the earnings. We kept fighting though. We fought over what to watch, what to listen to, what to eat. We fought over the golf ball money. I hit him. He kicked me in the teeth so Mom had to separate us.

We had nothing in common.

Girl I wanna make you sweat…

Our parents sat us down. They looked pleased with themselves. They explained that we would teach each other. Mutual respect would help us form a bond. I could draw. My brother knew computers. It wasn’t a terrible idea, and we took to it at first. He talked about system preferences, RAM, software and hardware. He was an Apple certified desktop technician with a little badge.

Meanwhile I won first place in the Coburg Dairy Farm Christmas Card design competition. I got a check for $25 which I was excited about. He sat at my desk and I told him to draw in short strokes. Instead of wandering across the page he made tiny marks that added up to a whole. An airplane. A house. A ninja turtle. These things in isolation are hard to fathom, but when you take baby steps it all comes together. I taught him to build a drawing.

He was pleased and we left our lessons enriched. We promised to do it again.

But we got older. We moved out of the rental house. He joined the track team and I played tennis. Grandma gave him a car while I used rollerblades. There were enough changes that we stayed out of each other’s way. The lessons fizzled of course. In college I’d get drunk and wonder about our relationship. I heard the same story from other brothers, how they used to fight but became good friends in the end. I believed this might happen to us.

Now he’s almost 40.

Back to the grocery store. I creep alongside the jarred sauces for I have reached Little Italy. I paw the magnificent jar of Arrabiata cautiously. I don’t trust myself, you see. I’ve knocked a few things over lately, so I open my hand slowly, place it around the desired object, close my hand, then bring it towards me. There are many steps to ensure success.

What could I teach him about drawing now? My brother. I’ve gone through endless cycles. Strength and weakness. Learning and unlearning. My drawings are patina. How do you teach that? My hands cramp these days and my old rhythms are gone. But in the new pain I find something particular. I draw a wandering line. Slowly. The slowest. Lentissimo. I learned how after a period of tremors. I responded. I close my eyes and close my fist near the tip of my pen and stretch the mark across the center of the page with zero speed. Minus speed. I let whispers of air push my hand in increments until a buildup of concentrated mass emerges.

Ouija.

Again, I am aware of the music. The lyrics unfurl and the drawn line in the substrate of my memory extends itself and I feel very calm. The chorus rises.

Vive bene. She lives well.

Vive male. She lives poorly.

Non esiste differenze. There’s no difference.

Turns out this is a sad song. Sad but very beautiful. Beautiful enough to send me deep into my ocean of memories. I surface. I am next in line. The kombucha bottles are less cold now. The words of the song are crystalline. There is no latency, there is no translation because I exist in real time. My words. My hands. My mind.

I’m part of a lineage of those who build patina. But I’ve been putting off a visit to my artistic ancestors. There are reasons. I’m busy. I hate the crowds at MOMA. It's hot. Too much design store bullshit, tickets are outrageous, my brain is fried, there’s not enough time!

I’m sick.

I want to protect myself. In the presence of greatness perhaps I’ll realize the folly of my own undertaking.

I’m weak.

But next to the Tàpies I realized I’d got it all wrong. Yes. The big one with sculpted grooves and sedimentary buildup. The one that vibrates. Gray Relief on Black, 1959. It’s a marvel.

I picture my brother on his knees in front of the Tàpies. Pay your respects, big brother.

Betty’s song is over. The song is average length but it didn’t feel that way. There’s a tickle behind my ear, somewhere unreachable. I touch my face and feel a flowering in my head. I bag my jars and bottles and fill my arms and move into the heat. The sliding doors open and I am stunned by a wall of sound. I take a mighty breath and walk into it.