I went off the deep end. Went way into it. Not that what happened was Margot's fault, or that it was David Elliott's, either. But I had been a critic. A critic looking at beauty always with a dose of cynicism like you have to if you're going to be any good. Harold Bloom says that all a critic can give, as a critic, is deadly encouragement to artists (poets, he was talking about), and always remind them how important art is, how great the responsibility of the artist. One of the differences between Margot and I was that she didn't consider what I did to be art. Poetry, lyrics, fiction: that can be art, she said. But writing about art? There's just no way you can make a piece of writing more successful than the original object you're writing about—the truer object. But I think it's like Nietzsche said: there are no facts, just interpretations. Subjectivity rules all, etcetera. And by facts I think he means real things: objects—exactly what Margot was arguing is the "truer" art. My PD, my psych doc, tells me I was attracted to her because she knew what she wanted—to be an artist, however she defined it—whereas I thought I was already being one. It just depended on another level of interpretation. And that's exactly it, the PD says; I had to look at what I did a certain way in order to feel okay about it. And I knew this. I knew I had to convince myself. Not just about her but about everything. If I had something I wanted to say about music or art, drugs made it easier to find the right words. The world, my PD told me, is all about perception, how you look at things. No shit, Spivey, I said. And since then I've been reading some Sartre I found in the library here, and you now how he said Hell is other people? I'm sitting in this fucking hospital and I swear to you it's worse than No Exit. Some kind of cruel joke, keeping that book in a mental hospital library. Anyway. Art, if you think about it in terms of Nietzsche and Sartre and Hell and God and Nature, art is just something changing interpretation. The object itself isn't art, it's the interpretation. I mean, Sontag defined art as stylized, dehumanized representation, and I think she's right. It's the neurons firing, the electricity of the mind changing direction. The position, not the disposition, she would say. That's the art. I thought about this and asked my PD if he thought about prescribing drugs as an art. He said: Hmmmmmmm, I'm not sure. And I said, Because, you know, that makes everything I see a work of art. And then he just looked at me like Margot used to, and said I needed to calm down.

 

2

Let me explain how it happened. Margot was a student at the University of Washington. I met her at the Crocodile three years ago, in Seattle, at a show we were both writing about—me for the Weekly, and her for the U's paper. I'd already noticed her at shows around town, taking pictures with a crappy pocket digital. She had blonde hair with this black streak where she'd dyed a portion about an inch wide, so she was easy to notice. It was what I called a Negative-Sontag. The opposite of Susan Sontag's hair, that black with a white stripe. So I went over to her once. I'm Eddie, I said, holding out a hand. Margot, she said. Your hair, I told her, it's a Negative-Sontag. And she was quiet and looked me up and down. Then she said, Listen, Eddie. I don't mean to be rude, but I'll buy you a beer if you don't talk to me any more tonight, deal? And she didn't say anything else so I agreed. Deal, I said. She bought me a Rainier and I wandered away. Like Bloom says, Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails. I kept watching for her during the band's set, but the band was sucking so I did a few lines in the bathroom and got in a fight with someone's drummer, threw him into one of the stalls. Something he said, and then he had his face against the urinal and I had cut my hand on half a bottle. I remember I could lift my palm up like a piece of cloth. I never did take well to coke.

 

3

Freud says something like this: A belligerent state permits itself any misdeed that will disgrace the individual. But Margot and I kept running into each other at shows, and I remember the next time I saw her I said, I guess I owe you a beer, Negative-Sontag, and she asked what had happened to my hand, since it was all bandaged. I made something up. I didn't want to scare her or make her think I was some dangerous drug addict fuck-up. I read this thing she wrote in the UW paper about a visiting photography professor and thought she was an okay writer, but I wanted to impress her—Anatomy is destiny, Freud said—so I gave her the number of the Arts Editor at The Stranger, so she could see about doing a feature on the professor for them. It was a good gig for a college student, a good clip for the portfolio; I guess that's why she wanted to be my friend at first. Some nights she'd come by my apartment and we'd smoke up together and fool around. It was always her idea. I would get so high sometimes that it would feel like it was all a dream, like she'd never even come over at all. I'd usually pass out, and when I'd wake up she'd be gone. Shuffled off my mortal coil, you might say. Once I woke up and looked at my stash and we'd gone through more weed than I thought two people could possibly smoke together. Still, though, my PD asks me if I think she might have been stealing from me, but I don't think she would have. I black out sometimes, I explain. And, yeah, you know what Nietzsche would say: Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

4

If we believe Sontag when she said that to photograph is to confer importance, then Margot's professor, David Elliott, was one hell of a photographer. I'd read about him in the arts sections of newspapers, and he was part of this review in The New Yorker once. He had a Guggenheim fellowship—academia fame, in other words. And he looked just like that in the photos of him: a young and somewhat famous person who could afford to drink good, expensive Scotch. Everything about him conferred importance. The show Margot wanted to write about was at one of those hipster galleries in Belltown—a place that made good money sentimentalizing the neighborhood's past, whatever had existed before the gentrification that birthed the gallery in the first place. Illness strikes men when they are exposed to change, Herodotus said. In these places, they'll put a graffitied bathroom stall behind UV-protected glass, or arrange one of Kurt Cobain's smashed guitars behind a velvet rope to try and make it look all haphazard and natural. I saw The Stranger’s Arts Editor having drinks one night at a place near the gallery and went in to talk to him. Margot had sent him some clips. Margot's a good writer, I told him. She can do it. A little obsessed with Didion, but I guess it's a phase we all go through. I laughed. Sounds great, the editor said. An Elliott piece would be good. Margot says she's related to him or has a class with him or something? Yeah, I said. Great, the editor said. Elliott's stuff's great. Then the editor got up and left to meet someone. Great. Everything was fucking great to these editors.

 

5

Yes, I'm in a hospital now. Call no man happy until he's dead, Herodotus said. I'm at Western State, in Tacoma, where Frances Farmer, the Hollywood actress from the '40's, once stayed for electro-shock treatments. They've written books about her. Kurt Cobain even wrote a song about her, called "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle." It's on Nirvana's In Utero record. A beautiful record. I miss the comfort of being sad, he sings. I should really write something about that while I'm here, I think. Or not. Maybe if I can get my thoughts straight I will. That would be a good thing for me to do. Raymond Carver said he never wrote a line worth a nickel when he was drunk, so maybe it'll be good for me to try writing clean. But if you ask me, that sounds like something you only admit when you're completely wasted.

6

I was a good critic. They didn't give me enough credit. In the month after the feature was published, when Margot and Elliott were working on her video project, she dyed her hair all black (no more Negative-Sontag), started drinking coffee instead of beer when I saw her at shows, and was harder to find around town. What's more, her musical tastes shifted back a decade. When I did see her, when she came by and did blow and fucked me, I always wanted to ask why she never stayed till morning. I embarrassed her. That’s fine, I guess. But every time I ran into her she kept pretending she didn't know me like she did, like she hadn't ever been to my place. Then there was the hair change, and the coffee, and I knew she was cheating on me with him, with David Elliott. I confronted her about her fucking infidelities in the alley outside a show. You whore, I said. You know what Kant would have told you? A lie annihilates the dignity of man. That's what he would have said.

7

I went to the gallery in Belltown for opening night of her group show. I had gotten kind of fucked up on coke beforehand because I was so nervous about seeing her. I hadn't seen her in a few weeks at least, and I missed her. She had stopped coming over, and so I'd just get high by myself and listen to Bauhaus until I fell asleep. She hadn't even told me she was in a group show, I had to read about it in the listings. I went to see her and her collaboration with Elliott—this video piece that was nine 13-inch television screens stacked three-by-three against the back wall of the gallery, with some videos playing. I can't remember. When I first saw her she was talking to the gallery owner, all smiles and gesticulation. Then, when Margot saw me, she smiled, kind of nervous, but still a smile. I started walking over and she looked over my shoulder and pointed at me and then suddenly there was this big security bear of a guy telling me to get the hell out. I looked back for her but she was gone, so I stood there looking at the security guy—we were in a gallery, so he wasn't going to get too physical surrounded by art—and I finished my beer slowly, then pocketed a full one, him following close with a paw on my shoulder as I walked out. When I was outside I turned and watched through the big glass windows. The security guard stood at the door, lit a cigarette, and watched me. I spotted black-haired Margot through the glass again, still talking to the gallery owner. Then I saw David Elliott for the first time, the first time in person, emerge from the storage room or some other place. He was wearing a CBGB t-shirt under a velvet blazer. He walked over to Margot and she pointed at me behind the glass. He smiled and waved like a priest.

 

8

I wandered down to First Avenue. All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking, I said to myself. Nietzsche had said that, and also that for a woman and man to form a friendship, there must exist a little antipathy, and I hoped this was just a phase. I passed the editor who'd published the original feature Margot had written. It had been a damned good piece. Margot had become a good writer, I'll give her that. I waved hello, then held my fingers to my lips to say I was going out for cigarettes. He gave me a thumbs-up. I kept walking. Great thoughts, great thoughts, I repeated. I walked a long ways, all the way downtown to the market, sipping from the beer I kept in my jacket pocket. I passed The Showbox, where I was supposed to review this new Portland band the following night, and then headed for the strip club just down the block, stopping in a self-pay parking lot to throw away the bottle and smoke half a joint I'd found in the pocket with the beer. The proper task of life is art! I screamed to no one in particular. Then, in the club I ordered the most expensive Scotch. Your most expensive Scotch! I demanded, and sat down next to the stage. The dancer was a skinny girl who looked like my best friend in grade school. Massive Attack was playing loud over the house speakers, all bass and heavy thumps. It was the song that goes, you are my angel, come from way above to give me love. I could see the skinny dancer's sternum between her tubular breasts hanging like socks full of pennies. She wiggled toward me with a dumb expression that betrayed nothing more than that she'd been doing this for a long time, and that she knew how to separate who she was here from who she was outside. I drank the whole Scotch at once, and thought how Bukowski had said that sometimes you just have to kick the whole bloated sensation of art out on its whore-ass. I wanted to scream again, and as I took a deep breath, I felt a burn and tightening in my chest. Then a sharp pain, piercing in time with the thumping of the bass in the song, and an image of Margot and David Elliott pressed together in the gallery storage room, black flames licking the walls. David Elliott was taking pictures of her, hanging them undeveloped from a rope that ended in a noose, and that noose was being pulled over my own dick. What would Freud have said? What would Sontag? My heart was like a fist punching from the inside. I stared at the dancer and thought of peeling her skin away What might be in there? Pennies in her breasts. I watched her coming toward me, dumb and blank. I loved her, I hated her, I loved her. I was sweating and shaking, could feel my face changing color. I wanted it to stop. Margot was screaming in my head, getting fucked to the beat of the music. The dancer swayed. She was doing this to me. The noose tightened. I don't know how, but the dancer, or the bartender, they'd poisoned the Scotch or something, David Elliott had paid them. I slammed the glass down under my hand and felt it break. I stood and the dancer was looking at me, not with the dumb look now, but like I'd peeled off her face and here was this little girl. A little girl to love. Sontag says pornography isn't about sex but is about death. Was I about to die? I remember the girl trying to cover herself as I stepped on the stage, and I remember the music was playing, loud and thick and beautiful, when they carried me out, covered in blood, singing like a king on their shoulders, and I remember now, sitting here and thinking back on everything, what Freud would have said: one is very crazy when in love.