Zombie (29 page)

“How cute,” Aimee says.

“Oh, you like this?” He sounds equal parts embarrassed and genuinely surprised. He holds it out for Aimee and I to see. The front and back cover show a crude sunset over black water.

“What do you use it for?” I ask.

“I write down the things I know I’ll never remember.” He slides the booklet back.

“Where did you get it?” she asks.

“In addition to being priest, I also collect antique glass bottles. The real thick ones. I make landscapes with them. I break the bottles with a hammer and crazy glue the shards of glass to a sketch that I’ve etched onto a tiny sheet of plywood. When I finish, I take a picture and make these.” Father Vincent retrieves his booklet again from his coat pocket and opens it in full. “This was a blood moon sunset over the Inner Harbor I saw when I was a kid.”

“Unbelievable,” I say. “A zombie nerd, priest, and oddball artist all in one.”

“Speaking of nerd, what are you reading?” Aimee asks Rembrandt, reaching for his book.

“Nothing terribly special.”

Aimee turns it over in her hands and reads the back.

“What’s it about?” Father Vincent asks.

“Isolation. Corruption. Redemption. Would you like to borrow it?” Rembrandt asks Aimee. “They say
Taxi Driver
is based on it. I know that’s one of your favorite movies.”

“Aimee, I have a copy at home you can borrow,” I say. “I even have a video that goes with it.” I avoid Rembrandt’s stare, but I sure as shit know it’s there. He can go fuck himself.

“I had no idea
Taxi Driver
was based on a Dostoevsky novel,” Aimee says.

Mr. Rembrandt flips through
Notes from Underground
to a particular page. “Here, Vincent, this is for you.” Then he reads. “
The long and the short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! … Oh, but even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!
”

He closes the book and slides it into his pocket.

“No idea what it means, but sounded great,” Father Vincent says. “We should go. Leave the kids alone.”

They walk to the door and disappear.

“How do you think his hands got all jacked up?” I tuck my pinky fingers into my palms and wave my hands over my head, making a banshee noise.

Aimee laughs but knows she probably shouldn’t as she looks around to make sure Mr. Rembrandt is really gone. I carry the glassware to the counter, handing them back to Howard, while Aimee wipes down our table with a napkin, sweeping my crumbs into her hand, and then walks them over to a trash can. She couldn’t be cooler if she tried.

“He come in a lot?” I ask Howard.

“Dude with the messed-up paws?” Howard bends his little fingers. “Every now and then. Usually he’s with dudes who are all messed up like him.”

“Messed up like, a bone through their nose messed up?”

“No.” Howard smiles. “Like, missing body parts messed up.” He steps away from the counter, away from me. “Dude, the tea’s working.” He taps his nose.

I hold my palm under my chin as drops of blood drip down.

Aimee appears at my side like I hoped she would and runs her hand across my back, handing me another tissue. She’s extraordinary. I would do anything for her. She doesn’t know it, but I would fight off an entire army of undead for her like
Shaun of the Dead
. My romantic-comedy of the Zombie Apocalypse—
Jeremy of the Dead
. Instead of
Sleepless in Seattle, Undead in Baltimore
. Faith and love and miracles.

Aimee leads us out into the dark. Her hand laces with mine—click.

T
he art exhibit is not what I expected. A table near the entrance serves red juice in tiny paper cups and a silver tray of Berger cookies, a Baltimore tradition of thick, cakey cookies smeared with a soft chocolate fudge on top.

Strobe lights flicker from a light system in the corner. The DJ is a chick with bleached blonde dreadlocks under headphones. I’m happy it’s not DJ Doug spinning the ones and twos. She bobs her head and shakes her body like a snake moving through tall grass as trippy, mellow drum beats drop from speakers buried in the ceiling. Everyone in the room yells to the person next to them in order to be heard over the highly stylized music. It sounds like the exit song of a film score. Like in zombie movies when the entire movie has some way-too-obvious keyboard-heavy film score—all cheese and slashery and screaming
DANGER!
Then in the final scene of the movie a wildly different and entertaining and halfway decent song plays, carrying over into the credits. This is the soundtrack to chopography.

The room is small, a single white open space, packed with a lot of white people.

Kids from school are dressed down in street clothes, which is weird for me to see—T-shirts, polo’s, jeans, and shorts. I got used to the neckties and khakis and sport coats, so the casual ware looks foreign. But Plaids are still Plaids.

Byron Hall teachers and Christian Brothers mill about too, the teachers in street clothes, and brothers in all black tunics.

Father Vincent is the only priest in the joint, doing his God
collar thing, and spends most of his time talking with Byron Hall students, whereas the Brothers stick mainly to the other faculty members, like at the mixer.

Other art patrons look like complete foreigners—small pockets of rich, artsy people in turtlenecks and tweed blazers and dickhead soul-patch facial hair with black-and-white fedoras. My guess is that they live in the area or read about the exhibit.

Some media arrive and gather material. Reporters for the
Baltimore Sun
and
Baltimore City Paper
scribble notes into notepads about particular pieces and interview attendees to get their reactions. Local news channels send reporters to cover the event. One-man camera crews mount hulking cameras on tripods. Beautiful male and female reporters apply makeup and practice their smiles in small mirrors, checking their teeth for stuck food.

And then there are the folks that you can’t really miss at all. Some are in strollers. Some are in wheelchairs. They clearly know Mykel better than white-bread Byron Hall knows him. It’s the public version of the Black Awareness Table in the cafe. African American and Hispanic men and women celebrate in loud voices, shouting out his name every few words. All are well dressed—nothing but slick suits, big ties, Windsor knots, big lady hats, bright colored dresses, and enormous jewelry.

A song ends.

Conversation rises across the room.

Mykel moves through, chilled-out, all swagger, trying to talk to everyone, while everyone demands he talk to them about his art. I remember when he said that everyone loves a black artist. Jimmy Two, someone all too familiar with crowds and boisterous attention, escorts a circle of females over to Mykel, who greets them each with a kiss on the hand.

Each wall of the space features Mykel’s chopography and each wall looks almost exactly the same: random photographs chopped up and mixed together like a salad and framed under thick wood. Oval squares. Small squares. Long rectangles. Even a few triangles. The frames arranged to replicate a wall of family photos, varying in
shapes and sizes. On a whole, it looks very professional, but I just don’t get it. The chopography. What it means. How it’s considered high art and not something I learned to do when I was in kindergarten. We did shit like this when we learned about consonant combinations from Miss Lydia.

I ask Aimee a question, but she can’t hear me, which is a fantastic ploy for me to move closer to her. My arm presses into her breasts. She smells like a unicorn. My dick hardens.

Miss Lydia was my kindergarten teacher and she was young and hot and had big breasts. I don’t remember much, but I do remember that she was young and had big ones. My favorite part of every day was when she’d stop by my desk and I’d feel her big breast press into my arm as she checked in to see how my craft was coming along. Her kindergarten projects were really no different than Mykel’s weirdo art. She’d give us a stack of magazines like
National Geographic, Good Housekeeping
and
Time
, scissors, paste, and a sheet of construction paper. Then, she’d ask us to cut out pictures of things that began with whatever combination we learned that day, like
wh
or
th
.

This, to me, is the G-rated version of chopography.

While similar, Mykel’s version is a far cry from the same fucking thing.

Elephants with human heads.

Lamp posts bursting into classrooms.

Taxicabs parked inside basements.

Blood-covered newborn babies with ram antlers.

White people on the light rail, holding on to poles with black fingers.

Black people with white feet on a beach.

Men breastfeeding babies on bus benches.

Women holding their penises while using urinals.

Little boys jumping rope.

Little girls in Boy Scout uniforms.

Dogs fucking cats with dildos.

Cats in a crowd, hailing cabs.

Pillows giving birth to frozen turkeys.

A table of multi-ethnic erect dicks with their passenger balls playing cards.

Mykel’s chopography is, no doubt, some R-rated shit.

If a mental health professional ever got their mitts on one of his chopography puppies, Mykel would be thrown in the Shep for sure. I overhear some Inner Harbor, uptight, turtleneck-wearing dildo-douchebag refer to the chopography as “disturbed and disturbing.”

To be honest, I completely agree, except agree completely separate from them and only to myself.

I
grab a paper cup of red juice for Aimee and myself, even though we just had tea, and I select the wall near the front door. Aimee receives her paper cup with a smile and she follows me through the crowd.

People are pushy as shit at art exhibits, it is pretty unbelievable—chit-chatting away without a clue who’s around them. I wouldn’t say that I threw any elbows or crashed into anyone, but I definitely kept some strangers on their toes.

We reach a particular piece and position ourselves in front of it. Prime real estate.

The photo is of the 55 bus approaching the stop outside of Byron Hall, except this is not your normal 55 bus. Instead, it has giant, leathery-looking, pterodactyl dinosaur wings stretching out from the sides. Spade-shaped blades spike along the roof of the bus like a stegosaurus. Tyrannosaurs feet and baby hands poke out from where the tires should be and an enormous mouth stretches below the front windshield that looks like it’s filled with big, old, bad shark teeth. The piece is framed in a simple, thin, black frame with a custard-colored matt behind the chopography. The name of the piece is
Greatness
.

I step closer and see people I know inside the bus. The normal 55 driver who says
sixty/forty
is even there. I am not there.

“I have no idea what this means,” I say.

“An individual’s interpretation plays a major part. There’s a dialogue that takes place between the art and the viewer. Like that miracle line I was telling you about at the end of
A Doll’s House
. It means something different to everyone.”

“I call bullshit. This is crazy. This doesn’t
mean
anything. It can’t possibly.”

Aimee finishes her juice. “How does
Greatness
make you feel?”

“Is this, like, a therapy session?”

“In a way. Experiencing this type of art is like a therapy session.” She presses herself into me from behind, directing my eyes. “How does looking at this particular chopographical piece make you feel?” She is really into this exhibit and art viewing experience, so I dig deep and try to focus on this bus with the dino parts. Her hands cup my shoulders and stop me from swaying. I focus so hard I feel like a light bulb might burst somewhere in the room, so I stare straight ahead and really focus. I need to do this for Aimee so I push again and think the word
concentrate
over and over in my head, but I think it so much that after a while the word loses all meaning and doesn’t even sound like a real word and becomes the only word that I want to say at all.

“What do you feel?”

“I feel horrible,” I say.

The problem is that I don’t feel
horrible
from the art, but rather absolutely terrified from failing to feel anything, failing to have a dialogue with this fucked-up bus. Before she turns this into a pop quiz and asks me why I feel this way, I turn it around on her and ask the same question.

She thinks for a minute, then says, “He’s captured the feeling of an insider having to take the transportation of an outsider.”

A group next to us talks about it too.

“From some of the other pieces I’ve seen, this one seems like an early work. A bit too on-the-nose.”

“I think we can easily connect the evolution of mankind to technology and the socioeconomic infrastructures constructed to prevent a return to primitiveness.”

“I like the title.
Greatness
. But his images are too immediate. There needs to be more subtlety.”

All I want to do is throw up. I can’t find anything relatable in
these glorified collages. Here’s a piece of art. Let’s take a look at it. It’s a public bus with animal parts.

We stop at the next photo of a beautiful, wild, garden of purple, yellow, red, and green flowers under a massive black sky stuffed with interconnecting and varying sizes of copper, gold, and white plastic tubing. In the middle, a very small single line of copper tubing runs down from the heavens into the garden. The title
—Paradise Plumb
.

Aimee examines the holy hell out of the next photo, but I’m over it. This art makes me feel like I have to take a leak.

I spot-check the crowd again and don’t see Mr. Rembrandt.

Father Vincent stands by the DJ’s booth with Frank and Anthony, all three drinking the red juice, making their way around the room together at a turtle’s pace. I am so freaking happy to see Frank and Anthony. I honestly didn’t know that they’d still be enrolled as students after everything. If Brother Lee had been the one to break up the infamous hallway showdown, I’m sure they’d be gone for good. Cam and his shitbirds aren’t anywhere to be found. I don’t see Cam or the Plaids or Coach O’Bannon anywhere, but I know they’re around. They’re always around.