Gogh Is Gone (Chapter 1)

by Nancy Freyburger

     “Dear Violet,” began the note pulled out of the Harry Winston diamond dog collar of my precious dog Gogh, shivering in a fireman’s arms. “I don’t love you anymore. Haven’t for a really long time, I’m thinking maybe never. I do, however, love our maid, Consuela. We’re running off to Paris to start brand new lives as Christian missionaries. Since we will need some start-up cash I’ve cleaned out our bank accounts. I’m sure you won’t mind. It’s for the Lord’s work after all. I felt in order to ensure closure for us both it was important to torch the house. Hey, it’s only stuff anyway. Cheers! Silas. P.S. How many times have I told you enough with the frigging flower paintings.” Ouch. There is no poison deadlier than ink. Closure? That’s only applicable to events that didn’t matter much to you in the first place. Most calamities in one’s life never reach closure. Their memory leaves you for awhile, you laugh again, you love again, but eventually the memory will pop back into your brain at an unexpected and inappropriate time, triggered by something as mundane as bacon frying on a cold Monday morning in January.

     I stood staring at my former home, which in a brief two-hour period has been transformed into a giant ball of fluorescent blue, mango orange, and poinsettia red flames. Funny how something so physically beautiful and so colorful could be so devastating. I’d only gone down the street for some Bloody Marys and some fresh air, in that order. I needed both after making the mistake of opening the paper this morning to the Arts section instead of the one which contains daily horoscope readings from Diandra. It undoubtedly would have said, “Are you out of your bed while you are reading this? Immediately go back to bed if you are. Stay in bed all day and sleep. Don’t even think about starting this day, sister. If you do, it promises to be a lulu.” Instead I saw some large printed words on the top line that said, “THE HAS-BEEN THAT NEVER WAS.” Reading further to find out who the poor sucker was, I was startled to find the poor sucker to be none other than myself. Cruel journalistic wags. How dare they trash my flower paintings. So what if I’d done them for thirty years?

     I began painting flowers when I was seven years old and emerged from a trance-like state I had been in for a month after watching my parents drown on a lovely spring day. You would have thought that experience alone would have set me good and straight about the seriousness and fickleness of fate. But I still slap my hands to my face, which has a startled look on it, every time something really awful happens to me. We were at a family picnic by a lake in Southern Illinois. The sky one moment was a gorgeous, paradise blue, not unlike the blue bunting of newborn baby boys. The next moment it turned black, black as a painting would be with the title “A Thousand Crows at Midnight.” With the change in sky color came a powerful storm. One minute my parents were waving and smiling at me as I stood on shore. Faster than I could swallow my own spit, their boat tipped over and they didn’t come up again. Alive that is. I sat speechless for a month, eating only Oreo cookies dipped in milk and staring into space. Or so I’ve been told. I can’t remember any of this. One time at a party a plastered shrink told me I probably was in the theta state during that period¾a place somewhere between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind where creativity and problem-solving take place. Somehow I got a double dose of the creative part and not even a minuscule dose of the problem-solving abilities.     

     When I returned to what some people consider reality, I started a painting frenzy with a paint set given to me by Idell Watson as a sorry-your-parents-drowned gift. I painted flowers on everything, all the time. Paper was the most traditional place, but I also painted them on the walls, the furniture, the floor, and I even attempted to paint them on poor old Trixie, the barnyard dog who roamed around the farm where I then lived with my Granny Buck and my cousin Zoreen, who was six weeks younger than I. Her mother, Amaryllis, died when Zoreen was six hours old. Her father, Harley, a one-armed wallpaper hanger, was so grief-stricken he took off and never was seen again. Trixie, who was seventeen and could barely move, tapped into some sort of adrenaline rush when I approached him with a paintbrush and took off down the lane with the speed of Roadrunner chased by Wile E. Coyote. Granny ranted and raved about the walls and furniture being painted, but I didn’t care. I was possessed. The flowers I painted were so realistic they looked like photographs. I painted flowers I had never seen before, the images of them just popped into my brain. My roses had petals that looked like velvet. People were always rubbing their fingers over them to see if they were real. Elmer Frank, who owns the ostrich farm down the road, once went up to one of my paintings and tried to smell it. Word of my paintings spread and eventually a big-city art dealer making a tour of rural folk museums stopped by to see them. “Why don’t you move to the city when you get older and we’ll clean up on these suckers, especially with the dead parents story to back it up.”

     At sixteen, due to a fierce personality conflict with Granny’s granite personality, my personal fiery brand of teen angst, and the absence of Zoreen¾pregnant, out of the house, and unavailable as a buffer in the war zone¾I left Podunkville for the big city to seek my fame and fortune. The paintings were good enough, but there are lots of talented painters. I got lucky. Made a lot of money. The poor little orphan girl story and the flower paintings were a publicist’s dream, a whammo combination.

     I wasn’t the only person who got lucky. At the same time I was hitting it big, another painter was also hitting it big. It was Silas, my dearly beloved, who penned me the sweet note I pulled out of Gogh’s collar. His shtick was that he painted polka dots. Only polka dots. And only black and white polka dots. The dimension of the black dots was the only difference between one of his paintings and another. And he has the nerve to say my flower paintings are tired? If that isn’t the polka calling the dot black. He also had a fascinating childhood story. He had been a child preacher on the chitlins circuit. We met at the opening of one of his shows entitled, The Metaphysics of the Black Dot. It was love at first psychosis. We shared so much. We were both painters. We had both come out of nowhere and become famous. We shared a philosophy of life: Always Live in Denial, Delusion and Fantasy, the triplets of happiness.

     Silas had learned a lot about smoke and mirrors, having been a baby preacher. Only problem is smoke gets in your eyes, and sometimes mirrors crack. When he was sixteen he had had it with his overbearing, cruel father, who used to hold his head down in a bucket of ice water if he didn’t learn Bible quotes fast enough. He took off for the Big City, too, like I had. He slept on park benches, using old newspapers as blankets. One day one of those papers featured a painting that had sold for half a million dollars. That painting was a solid brown canvas with nothing on it but brown paint. “Thank you, Jesus,” he said to himself. He knew he could come up with something as good as that.

     The modes of transportation for folks traveling in the world of Fantasy are fun, drinking, drugging, shopping, partying. On my occasional phone call back home I would tell Granny how much fun I was having, and she would always say, “You just think you’re having fun.” At which point I would answer, “Well, if I think I’m having fun, doesn’t that mean I AM having fun? I mean, we are what we think we are, aren’t we?” and slam down the phone.

     There were two things that drew me to Silas. The first thing was his intelligence. He always had something provocative and interesting to say. In the beginning, when I was first falling in love with him, I used to catch myself staring at the air right outside his mouth, where words would land as if they had a physical presence. That’s how magical I thought he was. Everything he said was so special that it couldn't possibly end when he finished a sentence. The Angel of Imagination was clearly whispering things in his left ear. He then would pronounce what the angel had imparted. But that’s where it ended. Once an idea had been verbalized, he was tired of it. No great idea ever manifested itself into fruition. In that short trip from his brain to his mouth, he became bored by the idea. And boredom was his nemesis. He hated this quality in himself, but he was powerless to change it. He couldn’t change this quality, but he could run from it. He could escape. It was all so painful to watch that I had to escape watching him escape. When you have two people desperately wanting to escape and no one to talk them out of it, they—guess what—escape.

     The other thing that drew me to Silas was his eyes. His irises were a pale crystal blue, the color an ice cube would be if it had just a drop of blue food coloring in it. There was a chartreuse ring around the pupils. Even though there were usually tiny red lines crisscrossing them and a filmy glaze over them, they were very hypnotic. Village of the Damnedesque.

     There was one bright spot in our messed-up little universe. Our most prized possession, or I should say, my most prized possession, because he was much more mine than Silas’, was an adorable one-eared pooch named Vincent van Gogh (for obvious reasons), Gogh for short. One night, or should I say early morning, as we were returning from a night of raging, we stumbled upon him in a snow bank in front of our home. He was in bad shape, shivering and bleeding from cuts all over his body including a badly mangled left ear. “The ear will have to go,” the vet told us. “It’s too damaged to be saved.” I treated him like I had found Moses in the bulrushes. He became my döppelganger; we were two little orphans, he and I. He took very well to the decadent lifestyle, and why shouldn’t he? He had two seasoned teachers.

     Some people thought he was ugly with his short legs, tank-like body, small head, wiry dishwater-blond fur. He, too, had blue eyes, Swedish blue. It didn’t matter to Gogh if people thought he was ugly because he seemed to possess the same psychological reverse that anorexic teenage girls exhibit. They may have the body fat of a string bean, yet when they look in the mirror they see a fat girl. That reversal in the brain happened to be a good thing for Gogh. He spent hours looking at himself, and you could tell he thought he was quite beautiful, even studly. Sometimes I got the feeling he thought he was GOD. I probably helped keep this illusion alive by giving him a tiny bowlful of champagne before hand-feeding him his broiled lamb chop, which had been preceded by a bibb lettuce salad. His accessory was a real diamond dog collar.

     Silas gone, career gone, house gone, little Gogh and I tried to carry on with the lifestyle we were accustomed to living. In fact, we intensified our efforts. Basically, we partied from dawn to dawn, staying over with friends who had an extra bed. Try as I might to avoid it, a bone-chilling funk ensued and would not leave. It was time to try something different, very different. Of course, with no money and no place to live, I decided to retreat to a rusted-out old turquoise trailer on the back forty of the farm where I had been raised and give asceticism a whirl ¾the only thing I hadn’t tried. If Gogh thought it would work to roll his eyes in the back of his head and pretend he’d suffered a stroke when I gave him the news of our imminent departure, he was wrong. WE were going.