How to Paint an American

Chapter 3

Verse 1

A woman’s dusty, red-heeled shoe spiraled down in awkward pirouettes from the near haze of the sky before hitting the ground slower than it should have. Clouds of marauding dust and cement followed behind and turned life into night. The day of 9/11 had not yet concluded and something else entirely was being born in the moment: A fetus of the rapture, wrought by a time it never wanted.

A man sat choking in a dust silhouette. He was unable to breathe because of the events unfolding around him. His time had passed. He had had his moment in the Vietnam War that left shining cat’s claws across his back. Now he was in another moment, a more important one in which he was stoically choking, for it was the future—a time of indiscriminate terror and detente. It was a way life after the war—at least for him—except now he could taste it in suffocating gasps; the remnants of fire and coated breath coagulated in his mouth. He thanked God that he was not born in New York so he could die away from the land of his birth. The amorphous dark he could not recall was more terrifying than the sizzling dust dancing across his nostrils, singing the melancholic tomes of eternity in his ears.

himLater he would stumble blindly to a bar and drink single-malt scotch on the house. A first for him. Now he had his moment. New York was bigger than eternity—that was the joy of the whole thing—but it was not bigger than this moment. The world was not bigger than this moment. So, he prayed at the altar of the bar for the drink to help him escape, for the high-class oblivion from the shaman. He prayed hard now, and for the rest of this day, until night became night again and a wayward star would pierce through the towering skyline and curiously wonder what had changed in the land of parched light below.

The scotch mixed with the ash he could not remove and startled him with its acrid awfulness. It was something tart and more expensive than he could have ever wanted. He thought about the tragedy of this tale. Prior to the cascading shadows of dust and death, New York was a place that ensured obscurity so everyone sought a safe niche they could call identity. Lives were lived and spent ultimately to be in a place, to have an identity in this place. In any other place he would have been a better man, but here he was nothing. He could be nothing no matter how talented he was. That was the joy of it all.

thisThis tale was not about him, though. It was not about this moment, either. There was something to come before he was finished with his life and this city, before he could die—something important he could never remember because it was not what he had been trained to seek.

Down the bar a grown man wept, consoled by no one because everyone else was buried in each other’s arms. He was the odd number because Jerome Ironside, the man with the Scotch, would not move. He would do nothing the rest of the day but drink and weep when the ice cube he had been staring at melted without his really noticing.

It had all been wrong: his life, his dreams, his reality. So, he wept and toasted to himself in praise of a life not quite wasted but not well-chosen. Then a gulp and a toast to the tragedy that was beyond face and comprehension. It would remain incomprehensible until that day when he would stand stark before a rising sun and realize that he had done something of consequence and that it all had an end, something that would endure long after he had washed the ash of America’s longest night down a clockwise drain.

A man of several baptisms, by ash and by water, the rest of his life he would wait for the final one—the only baptism he could love, that day when the sun would set and would never rise because he would not be there to see it. On that day he could finally curse the duality that had spawned him: his God and His city.